Seven months ago Quentin Tarantino told Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which may start shooting in Los Angeles sometime this month, would be more about hippy-dippy 1969 Los Angeles than the Tate/LaBianca murders by the Manson family. Exact quote: “It’s not Manson, it’s 1969.”

Maybe so, but the latest announcement of casting and characters for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood sure as hell overlaps with the August 8th murders at Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s home at 10050 Cielo Drive.

Damian Lewis is playing Steve McQueen, who was invited to drop by the Polanski/Tate home that evening but at the last minute decided to hang with a girl he’d just met.

Emile Hirsch is playing hairstylist Jay Sebring, who was one of the Cielo Drive victims along with coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Folger’s boyfriend Voytek Frykowski and an 18 year-old named Steven Parent.

Dakota Fanning is playing Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Manson family member who wasn’t at the Polanski/Tate home that evening but attempted to murder President Gerald Ford on 9.5.75.

Tate will be played by Margot Robbie, and Burt Reynolds will reportedly play George Spahn, the weathered owner of the Spahn Movie Ranch who allowed the Manson family to live on the ranch in the weeks and months before the August ’69 killings.

Guys like Jeff Sneider don’t understand the concept of owning Blurays, and to be honest half the time I question it myself, given the excellent quality of high-def streaming these days. But I’ve just ordered Kino Lorber’s 60th anniversary Bluray of William Wyler’s The Big Country, and for two good reasons: (1) It’s been newly remastered in HD (the last Bluray version surfaced in 2011, from MGM Home Video) and (2) it’s been completely de-mumpified.

Besides removing the horizontally-stretched “mumps” effect, this upgrade process also pulls in extra visual information from both sides of the frame.

But the mumps taffy-stretch effect that afflicted The Big Country‘s 2011 Bluray wasn’t a CinemaScope issue, as William Wyler‘s 1958 western was shot in 8-perf Technirama and then printed down to 35mm.

The problem was caused, rather, by the MGM Home Video geniuses who transferred the film, which had been restored in 2007 by the Academy Film Archive with support from the Film Foundation, to a high-def Bluray format.

I reached out Tuesday evening to Kino Lorber’s senior acquisitions vp Frank Tarzi, hoping to discuss the technical particulars. (Tarzi had previously helped with factors leading to Kino Lorber’s decision to issue their Marty Bluray in 1.37 rather than the dreaded 1.85.) But it was late by the Manhattan clock, and Tarzi didn’t respond.

Comparison images stolen from DVD Beaver review of Kino Lorber Big Country Bluray.

Mumps above, no mumps below

The general reaction to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal, 6.22) is that it vaguely blows. If I wanted to be harsh in my summary I would say it sucks dino balls, but I can’t say anything firsthand until I see it this evening. You know that a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 68% + a Metacritic score of 53%…you know what that means.

I could have gone to a 10 am press screening, but I had to see a dermatologist around the same time. HE will render a verdict tomorrow morning.

The director of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is Juan Antonio Bayona, whom I’ve personally known for over a decade. I still swear by The Orphanage (’07), his brilliant first film that was produced by Guillermo del Toro. I didn’t feel as enthused about The Impossible (’12) and A Monster Calls (’16). In any event Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom refers to him as “A.J.” Bayona, and that can’t be right. His first name is definitely Juan, and the second is absolutely Antonio — really, I know the guy, why would he switch them around?

Okay, I guess it’s still a thing in some corner of the culture. At least give the organizers credit for finally recognizing that in real day-to-day life, people of either gender are never judged by their appearance. At least we’re past that hurdle. So the next Miss America winner will probably be a bit pudgier than normal. This is where we are, no turning back.

Posted on 4.26.15: At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, emcee Cecily Strong “created a moment” when she asked all members of the media in the ballroom to raise their hands and take a solemn vow: “I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary Clinton’s appearance, because that is not journalism.”

Strong is correct — serious journalism and offering comments or asides about a person’s appearance are separate realms of expression. Do average citizens vote for or against a candidate based on his/her appearance? Absolutely not.

JFK‘s youth, matinee-idol looks, perennial tan and thick reddish-brown hair had no effect upon voter likes or dislikes. The fact that the Ronald Reagan didn’t have white or graying hair or a sagging, withered face when he ran for president in ’80 at age 69…nobody cared. They would have voted for him if he looked like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo because they were voting for the man, not the appearance. Barack Obama‘s cappucino skin shade had nothing to do with his winning the ’08 and ’12 elections…zip. And Hillary Clinton’s grandma face and puffy eye-bags will have no effect on her popularity during the 2016 Presidential election. The election will be entirely about who she is or is not…about character, cojones and convictions.

Here are two brilliant post-Solo-catastrophe riffs, but be honest — would The New Yorker and Variety have run these assessments if Solo had somehow connected and become a huge hit a la Last Jedi?

From Joshua Rothman‘s “The Growing Emptiness of the Star Wars Universe,” posted in The New Yorker on 5.31.18: “Early in William Gibson’s novel ‘Pattern Recognition,’ from 2003, Cayce Pollard, a highly paid professional ‘coolhunter,’ wanders through a London department store. Pollard is hypersensitive to the semiotics of brands: when a product is lame, she feels it physically, as a kind of pain. In the basement, she stumbles upon a display of clothes by Tommy Hilfiger. Recoiling from the ‘mountainside of Tommy,’ she thinks, ‘My God, don’t they know?’

“This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row…but Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

“I thought of this scene this weekend, after watching Solo: A Star Wars Story. “Solo” is an entertaining movie, with engaging performances, vivid production design and enthralling action sequences. It’s also distressingly forgettable — it’s about nothing, an episode of Seinfeld with hyperdrive.

“In ‘Pattern Recognition,’ Pollard wonders if Hilfiger’s blandness might be the source of his appeal: where most preppy clothes are freighted with meaning, Tommy allows you to look preppy without actually being that way. Similarly, Solo evokes Star Wars without quite being it. It isn’t the ‘null point’ of the franchise, but it’s close.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Why the Tanking of Solo is a Force of Darkness for Star Wars,” posted by Variety this morning:

“There have now been 10 Star Wars films, and right up until Solo, each and every one of them produced the kind of box-office grosses that were potent enough to bend the universe with the magnetic power of their the-whole-world-is-watching! hegemony.

Something in me deflates when I see some younger guy wearing dorky-looking footwear, particularly those awful white-rimmed Nikes that Millennials are so fond of or any kind of half-plastic, half-canvas combo, including gray or loud-color cross-training shoes, atrocious sandals, Crocs, etc.

Do younger GenYs, Millennials and GenZs have the worst taste in shoes in the history of western civilization? That sounds over-the-top but think about it. How many under-40 males wear super-cool-looking Italian shoes (and I don’t just mean traditional leather) on any kind of regular basis? Answer: Almost none. How many hinterland tourists wear X-factor shoes of any kind? Same difference. Whenever I notice someone wearing great-looking shoes I’ll sometimes tell them so, but I can’t remember the last time this happened in Los Angeles.

The only region in the world in which guys wear great-looking shoes with any frequency is Northern Italy, and even then it’s a spotty proposition. Older, silver-haired Italian guys are the standard-bearers. Under-40s, even in Italy, are almost uniformly opposed to what I sometimes call the Daniel Day Lewis or Bruno Magli aesthetic.

2018 is one month away from being half done. In my book that’s close enough to compile a halftime edition of the Best Films of 2018, and so here they are — the six best of the year so far, and by this I mean the ballsiest, the least compromised, the most transcendent, vivid and articulate, and the most likely to be remembered at year’s end: Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, Ari Aster‘s Hereditary, John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here and Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker.

Yep, four narratives and two docs. No doubt about it. Most of the shills posting half-year assessments will be putting Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther in their top five, but I don’t kowtow — it’s half of a really good Marvel flick.

I’m proclaiming this knowing that the current month of June contains, by my sights, only one solid narrative standout (Hereditary) along with a single brilliant doc (The King) and a kind, gentle, congenial heartwarmer (Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor). There is also a highly promising trio opening later this month — Brad Bird‘s Incredibles 2, Shana Feste‘s Boundaries and Stefano Sollima‘s Sicario: Day of the Soldado.

The seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth-place finishers are, in this order, Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, Black Panther, Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut and Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs.

Working backwards, starting with May and ending in January but without riffs or recaps — most titles link to my original review:

May: First Reformed and Filmworker, in a walk. (The links explain why.) May’s second best doc was RBG — a steady, assured and comprehensive portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wasn’t all that excited about Jason Reitman‘s Tully when I saw it last January, but don’t let me stop you.

April: A Quiet Place and You Were Never Really Here led the pack, but Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut was a respectable third-placer, and right after that came Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience and then John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick. I never got around to posting a Lean on Pete review (apologies) but it holds up pretty well in retrospect. The Rider was an honest, affecting rough-hewn exercise sans charisma or a way out of the mire.

I hated Where Is Kyra?. I Feel Pretty, which I saw late, was an off-tempo reach and an all-but-total wipeout commercially.

Variety‘s Dave McNary is reporting that Solo: A Star Wars Story is deader than dead, deader than roadkill, finito, flatline. Tracking forecasts a $28 million haul this weekend in North America, which will translate into a stunning 67% drop from last weekend’s opening of $84.4 million, which itself was seen as shitty.

If this was happening in Japan the Solo team would probably be considering the idea of ritual seppuku. Then again Solo has already disemboweled itself on its own dime. I don’t think it would’ve mattered if Disney had decided to release it next December; I think it still would’ve bombed. The Miller-Lord debacle plus the casting of Alden Ehrenreich as young Han Solo — arguably the stupidest mainstream Hollywood casting decision of the 21st Century — is what did it. Solo almost certainly wouldn’t have bombed so badly they had just hired Ansel Elgort instead.

The person most responsible for this calamity is obviously producer Kathy Kennedy. Obviously we don’t “do” seppuku in this country, but if I were Kennedy or Ehrenreich I would drive out to the desert and lay low for a couple of weeks. Wait until the cloud of calamity blows over.

In Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, there are two clear descriptions of or projections about Martin Sheen‘s Cpt. Willard being the ultimate messenger — a guy who, when he returns to the U.S. of A., will set the world straight about what Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kurtz was actually up to in his Cambodian Angkor Wat-like hideaway. Twice a hope is expressed that Willard will do this.

Kurtz to Willard: “I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything…everything I did, everything you saw…because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me.”

There isn’t much difference between Kirk Douglas and Cyd Charisse‘s mad sports-car drive in Two Weeks In Another Town (’62) and Lana Turner‘s mad, careening drive through the Hollywood hills in The Bad and the Beautiful (’52). The bond, of course, is that both sequences were directed by Vincente Minnelli, and both films starred Kirk Douglas as a jaded film-industry pro with an occasional tendency to suffer over-the-top emotional fits.

A Warner Archives Bluray of Two Weeks in Another Town pops on 6.19. It’s not a great film — it’s actually strained and overwrought — but it captures Rome at an interesting period, the end of the heyday of a city known in the ’50s and early ’60s as the capital of La Dolce Vita — swinging, top-down, martini-inhaling, Ray-ban hedonism.

You know that some cable or streaming broadcaster is going to rush in and attempt to acquire Racist Rosanne and re-launch the show ASAP. I don’t know who but someone will; maybe two or three. It’s obviously a hot-button show, and a good 30% of the country swears by her bullshit. The hoo-hah happened after Rosanne tweeted an offensive description of former Obama adviser Valerie Jarett, to wit: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Rosanne is a Trumpster, and Trumpism is about pushing back against the Wily Pathan. This is partly why the show is popular. Rosanne lives in blue territory but she’s “one of them” — a rural bumblefuck. ABC execs are cut from a different cloth. When has a huge hit show been so quickly and abruptly cancelled? This is pretty much without precedent.

A woman you’ve just met can find you extremely handsome or fetching or fuckable, but you can’t be of the same opinion. You’ve been looking at yourself for too long, and you’re all too aware of the fears and anxieties and unsettling undercurrents that lie beneath those facial features. I applaud anyone who would say they’re completely pleased or at least at peace with their face because it conveys a good attitude — accept yourself and your life thus far without guilt or judgment, and keep the door open for better chapters around the corner. This is how I see myself, and so I completely get what Isabelle Huppert was saying when she said there’s “nothing” about her appearance that bothers her. She’s lying, of course, but in a healthy way.