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Life Of The Party (Warner Bros., 5.11) is the latest comedy from Melissa McCarthy and husband/co-screenwriter Ben Falcone. The trailer is selling another coarse McCarthy vehicle, this one about a klutzy divorced woman who returns to college to get her degree, much to the chagrin of her daughter (Molly Gordon). Everyone’s been referencing Rodney Dangerfield‘s Back To School (’86), about a wealthy but amiably crude fellow who does the same thing, much to the chagrin of his son (Keith Gordon). But the first film to run with this story (I think) was High Time (’60), in which Bing Crosby played a successful resturateur (i.e., hamburgers) and widower who goes back to college at age 51.

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In his 30s, director James Foley was in a pretty good groove. I’m talking about an eight-year period in the ’80s and early ’90s. The R-rated Reckless (’84) was nothing to get overly excited about, but then came At Close Range (’86), which I’ve long regarded as Foley’s near-masterpiece.

Next was Who’s That Girl (’87), a mostly misbegotten screwball comedy with Madonna, followed by an edgy, hard-boiled noir called After Dark, My Sweet (’90), which I don’t even remember. But then Foley rebounded big-time with the flinty, hard-boiled, universally admired Glengarry Glen Ross (’92).

Foley directed six decent but mezzo-mezzo dramas between ’95 and ’07 — Two Bits (’95), The Chamber (’96), Fear (’96), The Corruptor (’99), Confidence (’03) and Perfect Stranger (’07). And then he more or less shifted over to a journeyman TV realm. Foley directed 12 episodes of House of Cards between ’13 and ’15, and two episodes of Billions in ’16.

And then — aahck! aahck! — Foley returned to features last year by directing 50 Shades Darker, which no one paid the slightest attention to, and then he doubled down on this dubious association with the about-to-open 50 Shades Freed.

I re-watched At Close Range last year and really re-admired it, and everyone swears by Glengarry Glen Ross. We all have to pay the rent, the butcher and the plumber, but it seems a shame that the guy who finessed these two films and made them into semi-classics is currently reduced to the 50 Shades realm.

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So Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story is going to be a kind of goofy adventure romp…right? Clearly, Anthony Breznican‘s EW cover story is conveying this and then some. Solo won’t just be witty or bantery or sporadically amusing but “the funniest Star Wars movie yet.”

Have previous Star Wars films been “funny”? They’ve all been occasionally nudgy or quippy to some extent, and were never 100% dramatic (even The Empire Strikes Back had moments of humor). You could argue that The Last Jedi has been the most digressively humorous of all the installments, but it still couldn’t be called comedic.

Then again a humorous approach was what original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, fired by producer Kathy Kennedy on 6.20.17 and replaced by Ron Howard, had in mind all along…right?

Last summer’s stories about the whacking of Lord and Miller seemed to agree that while Lucasfilm, Kennedy and Solo screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan believed the duo would be supplying a certain comedic flavor, Lord and Miller more or less believed they were hired to make an adventure comedy.

A 6.22.17 Breznican-authored EW story reported that “ever since filming began back in February ’17, Lord and Miller, who are known primarily for wry, self-referential comedies like The LEGO Movie, 21 Jump Street and the pilot episodes for Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Last Man on Earth, began steering the Han Solo movie more into the genre of laughs than space fantasy.”

The presumption was that Howard would be modifying Lord and Miller’s comedic approach, at least to some extent. But now EW‘s cover is all but calling Solo a laugh riot.

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A 15 year-old discussion about Roman Polanski‘s 1977 statutory rape episode has come back to bite Quentin Tarantino in the ass. The chat was between QT, Howard Stern and Robin Quivers, and of course was aired on Stern’s show. In early ’03 Tarantino’s remarks were obviously beyond the pale, but in today’s atmosphere…? Forget it.

Earlier this morning there were YouTube captures of the actual verbal discussion, but Sirius XM has had them removed. Here are portions from a Variety transcript:

Tarantino: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing. He had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word ‘rape,’ you’re talking about violent, throwing them down; it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. Throwing the word ‘rape’ around is like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything that people use it for. He was guilty of having sex with a minor.”

Quivers: [the sex wasn’t consensual.]

QT: “No, that was not the case at all. She wanted to have it and dated the guy.”

Quivers: “She was 13!”

QT: “And by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, we’re not talking about the morals in Europe and everything.”

Stern: “Wait a minute. If you have sex with a 13-year-old girl and you’re a grown man, you know that that’s wrong.”

QT: “Look, she was down with this. She’s talked about it since, ‘No, he didn’t really do anything to me. It was a technicality for being 13.’”

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A friend who’s seen Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros., 2.9) says it’s nothing to write home about. A brief episode inflated into an okay but no-great-shakes 94-minute film. Padding, back-story and whatnot. Starring the real-life Thalys train hero guys — Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, and costarring Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer.

The all-media screening is on Wednesday night, at more or less the same time as Universal’s Fifty Shades Freed screening.

Dorothy Blyskal‘s screenplay is based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Soldiers” by Jeffrey Stern, Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos. Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer costar.

23 year-old Saoirse Ronan, who was honored last night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival but is also unjustly destined to lose the Best Actress Oscar to Three Billboards‘ star Frances McDormand, is at the top of her game right now. She’s obviously got it, and is certain to fortify her Streep-like portfolio by leaps and bounds over the coming decades. Everyone at the Arlington theatre, including moderator Anne Thompson, was thinking this last night.

But for all her intensity and brilliance Ronan has chosen to star or costar in more than a few iffy films over the last decade, and when you get right down to it she’s scored big-time in a stellar, triple-A, bull’s-eye fashion only twice — as the titular character in Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird and as Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn (’15).

She made a brilliant debut at age 13 in Joe Wright‘s Atonement (’07), playing a nearly demonic provocateur, and she acted the blazes out of her Susie Salmon role in Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, but the film was too Jackson-y and CG’ed to death. And she was completely delightful in Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (’14). And that’s as far as it’s gone so far.

Ronan has three films due for 2018 release, but the only one of real consequence will be Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, which Focus will release on 11.2. Reactions to Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Lionsgate, 6.15) have been muted, and her other ’18 release, Michael Mayer‘s The Seagull, was shot in the summer of 2015 — do the math.

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Last night’s Virtuosos celebration at the Santa Barbara Film Festival — moderated by Dave Karger, attended by Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Hong Chau (Downsizing), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound) and John Boyega (Detroit) — was easily the loosest, funniest and most spirited I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve been watching Virtuoso events since whenever they began. Nanjiani and Chalamet were the stand-outs, closely followed by Kaluuya.

I love Najiani’s comic attitude — dry, droll, blunt. 100% truth, incapable of gush.

I exchanged greetings with Chalamet at the after-party, and I was kind and considerate enough not to mention his recent decision to throw Woody Allen under the bus. I understand why he went along with the mob on this one. He has a career to protect and obviously needs to be in league with the cool kidz. It’s very easy to stand outside the arena on Monday morning and say “I would’ve acted differently or more thoughtfully” or what-have-you.

By the way: Nanjiani said he’ll be starring in a “low-budget” thriller for director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, whose 2010 short, Diarchia, I happened to see last year. I personally know Filomarino as “Ferdy” via HE’s own Luca Guadagnino. Nanjiani didn’t mention a title, but it’s set in Greece and will begin filming in August, he said. Contracts are being ironed out as we speak.

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In a just-posted N.Y. Times piece, Uma Thurman has told Maureen Dowd some specifics about Harvey Weinstein having sexually assaulted her, but the main thing is her continuing rage at Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino for having forcefully cajoled her into driving a shitty, rickety Karmann Ghia during a sequence set in rural Mexico. She wound up hitting a palm tree.

Dowd’s Times story contains the actual video.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Thurman’s then-husband Ethan Hawke let Tarantno have it.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he tells Dowd. It was like “Hey, man, she is great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

“Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, Thurman had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document ‘releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,’ she says. She didn’t.

“Thurman was in ‘a terrible fight for years’ with Tarantino, she says. ‘We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.’

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Last night Darkest Hour‘s Gary Oldman, a lock for the Best Actor Oscar if there ever was one, did 90 minutes on-stage with Leonard Maltin. The specific occasion was a presenting of the SBIFF’s Maltin Modern Master Award, the festival’s highest honor, and it was like a coronation. The generic thing when you host one of these SBIFF tributes is to prostrate yourself and worship the honored guest like he/she is a combination of emperor, genius and living God, and Maltin did that, all right.

“You’re perfect, Gary…everything about you is wonderful, and it gives us such pleasure to celebrate that. Allow us to kiss the ring.”

What I’m saying, obviously, is that I wish these tributes could be a tad less kiss-assy and a little more like those witty, erudite 90-minute discussions that Dick Cavett used to do with Katharine Hepburn and others, but you can’t fight City Hall.

They had a conversation about Oldman’s pre-acting career (delivering milk in the wee hours, getting turned down by RADA at age 16) and so on. They also screened the usual clips. I was deeply disappointed that Oldman’s portrayal of Joe Orton in Stephen Frears‘ Prick Up Your Ears was ignored. I knew they’d show a Sid and Nancy clip and the famous one from True Romance when Oldman played a rasta-haired drug dealer who thinks he’s black…I knew it!

Oldman was unfailingly charming and gracious — he played the part that was expected of him. And Maltin, being Maltin, stayed away from every interesting side topic imaginable. He didn’t get within 10,000 feet of Oldman’s conservative beliefs and his disdain for political correctness. I respect Oldman for his atypical non-liberalism — it’s one of the things that makes him interesting, distinctive. But there was no way in hell Maltin was going to bring this up.

My other regret is that clip of Oldman dancing to “Get Up Offa That Thing” while in Winston Churchill makeup wasn’t shown — it would have been a huge hit!

Past recipients of the Modern Miraculous Maltin Mashable Masters award have included Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Will Smith, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, Christopher Plummer, Christopher Nolan, Bruce Dern, James Cameron, George Clooney and HE’s very own Peter Jackson.

The first and only time I sat down with Devin Faraci was in ’09 or thereabouts, in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. I’d been invited by Ed Douglas (now with Jeff Sneider‘s trackingboard), who was also at the table. Seven years later a long-dormant sexual assault charge surfaced and Faraci was soon toast. A week ago at Sundance I asked Douglas where Faraci is now, and he said he didn’t know. Tonight Faraci will appear in an interview on Zainab Salbi‘s #MeToo Now What?, a five-part series.

From “Faraci Goes Down,” posted on 10.11.16: “Apart from the issue of whether or not Faraci is widely liked or has created enemies, does an intelligent if abrasive writer-columnist deserve career ruination because of an unmistakably odious incident? Is it fair to send a drunken driver who has hit a pedestrian and who may be suffering from alcoholism…is it fair to sentence this offender to a long, life-destroying stretch in San Quentin? Some out there feel that capital punishment is the way to go, but I don’t know.”

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has more or less thrown Woody Allen under the bus. Despite the facts in the most recent Robert Weide essay, the absence of any other accusations against Allen and evidence that child abusers are rarely one-time offenders, Scott believes Dylan Farrow.

“It’s a matter of who deserves the benefit of the doubt,” Scott explains. The article is anything but bluntly worded, but Scott seems to be basically saying that Allen’s history and more specifically his films contain little hints and half-revelations about his sexual nature and longings, and that these, to Scott, are sufficiently disturbing to give him pause.

This means, I presume, that Scott will be giving A Rainy Day in New York a bad review if and when it finds some avenue of distribution. (Everyone seems to believe that Amazon will cut the film loose sooner or later.) That or someone else will review it.

In his masterful Network, director Sidney Lumet clearly wanted the audience to regard Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale as half coming-apart but also half-inspired. As one who psychedelically sailed into the mystic and the Bhagavad Gita in my early 20s, I’ve always preferred to see Beale as a spiritual emissary, first and foremost:

“This is not a psychotic episode,” Beale says to William Holden‘s Max Schumacher. “This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana.”

Rose McGowan has meltdown on stage at Barnes & Nobles book signing after trans heckler yells that she hasn't done anything for trans women who are victims of sexual assault. pic.twitter.com/fTRafCUNcL

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 2, 2018

Last night a friend conveyed an opinion of Rose McGowan‘s hyper, cranked-up behavior on Late Night with Stephen Colbert and particularly her Wednesday night meltdown at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. McGowan is “losing her ever-loving mind. It’s basically Network. No one wants to say anything but it’s obvious.”

HE reply: “Yeah, she’s very hyper, like she’s on Ritalin. But sometimes the usual social niceties fall to the wayside when a person is really throbbing with a special spirit or current. She’s speaking her truth and seems sharp and lucid as far as that goes. On the other hand she’d like to string up a significant portion of the white male power structure, and there’s something a little Ox Bow Incident about that.”

Friend: “Is it drugs or is she just cray cray? She’s getting props tweets from Anthony Bourdain (‘In a world of timidity, compromise and bullshit , @rosemcgowan howls fearlessly at the moon‘) who clearly can’t see the problem here. Scary shit. Has to be drugs.”

HE reply: “Just as I was disinclined to see Howard Beale as raving and unstable, an instinct is telling me that however eccentric she may seem in terms of her manner and speaking style, McGowan’s anger is fed by honest experience, honest fuel. I’m not sensing a chemical imbalance as much as old-fashioned rage and rhetorical fire.”

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