I trusted the action in John McTiernan‘s Die Hard (’88). I didn’t “believe” it, but it was disciplined and well-choreographed for the most part, and it mostly avoided the outrageous. Now it’s all outrage, all absurdity, all Coyote vs. Roadrunner. Cliffhanger moments in 21st Century action thrillers are always solved with a half-second to spare. The hero grabs the rope, shoots the guard dog, ducks out of danger or figures out the bomb-defusal code at the very last instant. Every damn time. Thrillers have been using this last-second-solve device for decades, of course, but nowadays it’s almost all on this level. 59 years ago the dangling Eva Marie Saint losing her footing at the very instant Cary Grant grabs her wrist (at the 57-second mark) was cool, but if 90% of the damn movie is about a woman losing her footing, the audience will eventually get irritated and then more irritated and then mad.

Eugene Jarecki‘s The King (Oscilloscope, now playing) “is a nonfiction chronicle of the life and career of Elvis Presley, but it’s really a documentary-meditation-essay-rhapsody, one that captures, as almost no film has, what’s happening, right now, to the American spirit. What’s new — and revelatory — about The King apart from the soulful dazzle of Jarecki’s filmmaking, is that it asks, at every turn, a haunting question: When you take a step back and really look at what happened to Elvis Presley, what does [that] say about the rest of us?

“The King says a tremendous amount. In a way that no film has before it, The King captures how Elvis, while he was blazing new trails as an entertainer, was being eaten alive by forces that were actually a rising series of postwar American addictions.

“The healthy desire to be successful, and even to stay on top, evolved into an over-the-top lust to break the bank. Elvis started as a true artist, but in Hollywood his movies made a spectacle — almost a debased ritual — of commercial compromise. (You could chortle at a cheese doodle like “Blue Hawaii,” but you couldn’t argue with it, because it was the earliest incarnation of The Blockbuster Mentality.) And as an individual, Elvis, even as he remained a superstar, became the ultimate consumer. He ate and drank and ate some more, and sat on his gold toilet throne, and sealed himself off from the real world, like Howard Hughes on a junk-food binge that never ended. High on Dilaudid (i.e., opioids), Elvis shot out his TV screen with a gun. Today, he’d be on an all-night video-game bender.

“[Early on we’re shown] an inky-haired young rebel, who may have been the most handsome man of the 20th century, bring a vibratory erotic-ecstatic energy into the world (he didn’t invent that energy, but he channeled it, blended with it, and redefined it), and in doing so he changes the world overnight. He tilts it on its axis.

The current jacket art for Warner Home Entertainment’s forthcoming 4K UHD Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey is muddy and noirish looking — an arterial red close-up image of Keir Dullea’s Dave Bowman. Which is almost an exact visual opposite of the previous jacket art design that appeared last March, an image of the red-suited Bowman walking through a bright white passageway aboard the Jupiter-bound Discovery.

Why did WHE change the jacket art? My guess (just a guess) is that the glarey white-and-red cover was deep-sixed because it doesn’t agree with the subdued yellow-ish image from the same scene in the Chris Nolan-approved 4K version of 2001, which will “street” on 10.30.

If you haven’t been keeping up, Nolan’s yellow-teal “nostalgia” version elbowed aside a previous 4K UHD version of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic. 70mm prints of Nolan’s version opened in theatres a while back. The gleaming white 4K jacket-art image speaks for itself. Directly below is a grab from the scene in question as found on WHE’s 2007 Bluray. Below that is the same scene in Nolan’s un-restored version, which is the basis for the new 4K Bluray. The subdued yellowish tint is obviously darker and more subdued than the 2007 Bluray image, and is dramatically darker than the gleaming bright image from the three-month-old 4K jacket image. Do the math.

Directed by the “visionary” Panos Cosmatos**, Mandy (RLJE, 9.14) allegedly contains an epic Nicolas Cage performance. I say “allegedly” because I ducked this film during the recent Sundance and Cannes festivals. It just didn’t seem important enough to see at the expense of stuff I wanted to see more. But I’ll get there. Allegedly essential. Currently brandishing a 97% RT rating.

“As if its sole goal was to take the heavyweight title of Nicolas Cage’s Craziest Movie Ever, Mandy exhibits what Shakespeare called ‘vaulting ambition’ in producing the nuttiest ways for Cage to get into one phantasmagorical showdown after the next. Cosmatos’ full-out stylization complements it all, the director’s interest in scope and detailed production design leading to costumes, weapons and locations that elicit their own sense of wonder. Mandy shows an actor in his element and a director growing into his own, and we merely bask in this union in all of its cuckoo crazy glory.” — from Nick Allen’s Sundance review, filed on 1.20.18.

** 44 year-old son of the late George Cosmatos),

Boiled down, Jesse Peretz‘s Juliet, Naked (Lionsgate, 8.17) is a half-charming, half-thorny romantic triangle type deal. It’s a bit curious and lumpy at times, but essentially likable.

Set in an English coastal town and based on Nick Hornsby’s 2009 same-titled novel, it’s about Annie (Rose Byrne) gradually disengaging from her dorky boyfriend Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) and his fanboy obsession with a disappeared, Glenn Gould-like cult-rocker named Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), and gradually getting to know and then romancing Crowe himself, whom she meets online and then in the flesh when he travels to England to visit a long-lost daughter.

The film is basically about Annie recoiling from the realm of obsessive cult-rock fandom as she slowly engages with a flawed, aging, somewhat failed rock musician who’s already saddled with tons of baggage. On the other hand Annie is merging with an actual, real-deal artist (however failed or past-his-prime) instead of some website-running geek.

The problem for me is that neither Hawke nor O’Dowd are especially appealing in a romantic context, and yet Annie is obviously a looker and a catch. Right away you’re wondering how and why she got involved with the loser-ish O’Dowd in the first place, and then you’re wondering what she sees in Hawke, whose character, an admitted alcoholic, suffers a heart attack when he arrives in London and whose life is a mess, and who’s rather gray and creased and pudge-boddy with a wardrobe that’s basically “a blind man visits Goodwill”. (Hawke is 47 but could easily pass for older in this film.)

I was feeling a certain distance from the general story and situation, but then Act Three kicked in and Hawke sang “Waterloo Sunset” in front of a small gathering in Annie’s home town, and I was won over. Things eventually work out as you expect them to. The ending is actually pretty great, come to think.

On 6.21.18 Warner Home Entertainment posted a trailer for the forthcoming 4K Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which will street on 10.30. And it’s horrifying! Because the yellowish-teal color tint in this trailer is obviously the same color tint as the currently-playing Chris Nolan version of 2001. Watch it and tell me what you think.

It seems obvious (and please tell me how I could possibly be wrong about this) that the 6.21 4K trailer is proof that the yellow-teal Nolan version has been used as the basis for the forthcoming 2001 4K Bluray.

This means that WHE wasn’t kidding when an official press release (also issued on 6.21) stated that “for the first time since the original release [of 2001 in April 1968], new 70mm prints were struck from pristine printing elements made from the original camera negative” — i.e., the Nolan version. “A longtime admirer of the late American auteur, Christopher Nolan worked closely with the team at Warner Bros. Pictures throughout the mastering process.

“Building on the work done for the new 70mm prints, the 4K UHD with HDR presentation was mastered from the 65mm original camera negative,” the press release said. “The 4K UHD also includes both a remixed and restored 5.1 DTS-HD master audio track, as well as the original 1968 6-track theatrical audio mix.”

Frame capture from 2007 Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Same image copied from WHE trailer for forthcoming 4K Bluray, which contains the same colors and specificity seen in the Chris Nolan version now in theatres.

Posted on 6.21.18: “The key words, obviously, are ‘building on the work done for the new [Nolan-approved] 70mm prints.’ Question: If color-timer Leon Vitali told me that “the 4K has more clarity and sharpness and detail” than the 70mm Nolan version (and he did tell me this), why would the WHE people indicate that the Nolan nostalgia version and the 4K version are close relations if not more or less the same?

“One could surmise that Vitali’s 4K version was one thing back in April, but that Nolan has recently stuck his nose into the mastering of the 4K and that things have changed for the worse. I’m not saying he has stuck his nose into the process, but the WHE press release certainly suggests this.”

Unless the person who presided over the making of the 2001 4K trailer is deranged or incompetent, there’s very little ambiguity about this now. WHE’s trailer for the 2001 4K proves that the Nolan nostalgia version (i.e., a replica of the film Nolan saw on 70mm when he was 7 or 8 years old) and the 4K Bluray version are indeed one and the same. So Nolan did in fact stick his nose into the 4K Bluray mastering and changed the look of it.

Please consider two seemingly crucial factors about Nolan and his perspective on Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 classic.

One, it has been claimed in some quarters that Nolan is red-green colorblind. (I’m looking for definitive sources on this but here, for now, is source A — here is source B.)

And two, Nolan has stated that he wanted to create an “unrestored” 70mm version to look like a 70mm version he saw with his father in Leicester Square when he was 7 or 8 years old. Except Nolan was born on 7.30.70, or more than two years after 2001 premiered in the big cities. The 2001 Nolan saw with his dad in Leicester Square presumably screened in ’77 or ’78, so he didn’t see the original roadshow version.

Please once again consider a comparison trailer (posted on 4.24.18 by Krishna Ramesh Kumar) that presented the differences in color in the 2007 Bluray of 2001 vs. the then-forthcoming Nolan version that premiered in Cannes. It showed that the yellowish-teal colors in the Nolan version were quite different than the 2007 Bluray colors.

I believe that WHE’s decision to kowtow to Nolan’s yellow-teal vision of 2001 is nothing short of vandalism. I think it’s a flat-out tragedy. I think Leon Vitali, who did the color timing on an earlier version of the 4K Bluray and who is supposed to be the keeper of the Kubrick flame, needs to stand up and say “no, this is wrong…the Chris Nolan nostalgia version is not how 2001 should look.” I think anyone who knows what 2001 should look like should speak up also. This is horrific.

I keep hearing that Beautiful Boy is primarily a performance thing, and more specifically a Timothee Chalamet-will-snag-a-Best-Actor-nomination thing. It feels curious that there isn’t a single allusion to crystal meth in this trailer, much less an indication about whether Chalamet’s character snorts or shoots it. Meth addiction is what the film is basically about so you’d think it might warrant a brief mention.

Beautiful Boy will almost certainly be making the fall festival rounds (though perhaps not in Venice). It will open theatrically on 10.12.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I would be more intrigued if Woody Allen had been cast as Steve Carell‘s father and Chalamet’s grandfather. If that had happened, Chalamet probably wouldn’t have thrown Allen under the bus last January because he wouldn’t have wanted anything to mitigate his Best Actor campaign. That way Amazon wouldn’t be regarding A Rainy Day in New York as such a hot potato, and everyone would’ve been happy. Well, less unhappy.

Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man and the Wasp (Disney, 7.6) isn’t a problem unless you’re determined to complain about it not being as good as the original Ant-Man (’15). Which it’s not. But it’s still fleet, funny, disciplined, carefully honed, occasionally dazzling, light-hearted, pleasingly absurd…112 minutes worth of cool cruisin’ as you chow down on the overpriced crap. And those 112 minutes feel like 80 or 85, by the way. There are no significant downshiftings or speed bumps, or none that I noticed.

Please don’t let me (or any other sourpusss types) stop you from seeing it, but I’m telling you straight and true that Ant-Man and the Wasp is not quite as affecting, highly charged and/or head-turning as I wanted it be. It’s fairly proficient in the ways you might expect but at the same time it’s a bit of a slight letdown. You may feel the same way when you see it, but you’ll probably survive.

Why should anyone care if Ant-Man and the Wasp registers as an entertaining but inoffensive letdown? There are bigger fish to fry and meditate upon. See it or don’t see it. But don’t weep for the Marvel and Disney empires — they’re fine. On top of which the Rotten Tomatoes whores having given it a 96% approval rating.

What exactly is missing from Ant-Man and the Wasp that wasn’t missing from Ant-Man? The dopey subversive humor in Reed’s three-year-old original felt fresher, for one thing. And the story was more emotionally affecting as far as Paul Rudd‘s Scott Lang was concerned. He was in a fairly dark and despairing place as it began — ex-con, low-rent loser, not much of a role model for his daughter — so morphing into Ant-Man by way of Michael Douglas‘s (i.e., Hank Pym’s) brilliance and reluctant largesse really meant something. This time, not so much. But at the same time I didn’t feel burned by the story or journey or whatever you want to call it. I felt placated.

Good, occasionally amusing work by Rudd, Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne / Wasp), Michael Douglas, Michael Pena, Walton Goggins (fated to play pain-in-the-ass, low-rent villains for the rest of his life), Bobby Cannavale, Judy Greer, Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Abby Ryder Fortson (Rudd and Greer’s daughter Cassie), Randall Park, Michelle Pfeiffer (Janet van Dyne — rescued in Act Three from the sub-atomic, micro-quantum realm or whatever you want to call it), Laurence Fishburne (punching the clock), etc.

The fact that Rudd is pushing 50 and Lilly is pushing 40 are not interruptions, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of their biological earth-time factors.

Quentin Tarantino has described the pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood as a Butch-and-Sundance, Redford-and-Newman type deal. Maybe, but the wardrobes and hair stylings tell you everything you need to know about their characters.

A dead ringer for Adam Roarke (Play It As It Lays, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) in the late ’60s, Pitt’s Cliff Booth is a down-to-basics, rough-and-ready stuntman. DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is basically Robert Culp, a successful TV actor (I Spy) who began in the tradition-minded ’50s but struggled to find his footing when the industry pivoted toward youth fare in the late ’60s. Is that a peace medallion Leo is wearing? The mustard-colored turtleneck reminds me of a lounge shirt John Vernon wore in Point Blank (’67). If Dalton’s career was on a faster, more upward track, he might have landed Culp’s role in Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (’69).

Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Natalie Wood and Robert Culp in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Six years ago, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo overtook Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane in the once-per-decade Sight & Sound poll as the greatest film ever made. The next big vote won’t be for another four years, but in the view of esteemed critic David Thomson Vertigo‘s dominance may not last.

He sounds the warning in a 6.21 London Review of Books entry called “Vertigo after Weinstein.” The basic shot is that Vertigo is too much about obsessive male hunger for women and too dismissive of their feelings, too sexually perverse and generally too icky to remain the champ in this #MeToo and #TimesUp era.

Thomson’s last three paragraphs (which I’ve broken into five) sum things up:

“We have to be clear-eyed about Vertigo, and about what its power and influence tell us. It isn’t just that Alfred Hitchcock was devious, a fantasist, a voyeur and a predator. It isn’t just that no matter how many Harvey Weinsteins are exposed, it could never be enough to deliver justice to those who have been wronged and exploited. It isn’t even that men invented and have dominated the command and control of the movies, both as art and business: that they have been the majority of directors, producers and camera people despite, over the years, being a minority of the audience.

“Is what Vertigo has to tell us, beyond this history of male control, that the medium itself is in some sense male? Is there something in cinema that gives power to the predator, sitting still in the dark, watching desired and forbidden things? Something male in a system that has an actress stand on her mark, in a beautifully lit and provocatively intimate close-up, so that we can rhapsodize over her?

“In 2012, the Sight & Sound poll was urged on by a feeling that we’d all had enough of Citizen Kane. Welles’ film had been voted the best ever from 1962 to 2002. Few felt that the verdict had been unjust, but in a young medium was it proper for the champ to be a pensioner? Didn’t cinephiles deserve a more mercurial model, made in their lifetime? But the new winner was Vertigo, not very much younger than Citizen Kane, and its triumph was acknowledged as a rueful commentary on the ambivalent glory of being a film director, the auteur status that Sight & Sound was pledged to uphold.

I wonder if anyone has tried to re-edit Sicario with all of Emily Blunt‘s scenes removed, or at very least with her character reduced to a marginal figure. Sicario runs 121 minutes. A Blunt-free or Blunt-reduced version, if it exists or if someone assembles it, would maybe run…what, 80 or 90 minutes? I’m imagining this because I was so turned around by Sicario: Day of the Soldado. I didn’t have a Blunt problem in Sicario because I don’t like women in Mexican drug-dealing dramas. At all. The young Isabela Moner is awesome in Soldado — she owns almost every scene she’s in. But I don’t care for female FBI agents who are better at registering naive emotional responses to grim situations (weeping, shuddering, taking showers, picking up strangers in bars) than doing their job.

You almost don’t have to read Julia Ioffe’s GQ profile of Donald Trump, Jr. Because Nigel Buchanan‘s illustration pretty much says it all. Final paragraph: “Like Republican populists of the past decade, Don speaks of ‘real Americans,’ people he defines as ‘the forgotten people between New York City and Malibu.’ It’s an improbable notion: that the billionaire’s kid from 66 stories above Fifth Avenue is the one who speaks for the disaffected and the overlooked. But it’s no less surprising than the faint rumors suggesting that he might someday run for office — a way to finally, perhaps, make a name for himself.”