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Sometime this afternoon (and hopefully before 3 pm), Hollywood Elsewhere will be driving up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The festival is operating under some spiritual duress, as recent trade stories have made clear.

There’s been much hand-wringing over the recent Montecito mudslide tragedy, which has caused the Four Seasons Biltmore to close until April 1st. No debris is littering Santa Barbara’s State Street, but the mantra of SBIFF director Roger Durling has been “never say die,” “let’s stand together” and “sticks and stones may break our bones, but mudslides will only make us stand taller.” Or something like that.

Actual Durling quote: “People want to be together and the festival is a way to do that. It was essential for us to get our act together.”

All I know is that the Montecito region of the 101 freeway has been open for about ten days now. I’ll probably encounter delays, but perhaps not hellish delays. Update: I couldn’t get it together in time. Driving up tomorrow morning.

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The final hour of Black Panther really nails it. It delivers the same kind of junkie fix that Marvel fans are accustomed to paying for, but it’s escapism fused with social vision and progressive identity politics — African pride, honor, heart, nativism, community. The last hour saves the day, but the first 75 is mainly about set-up and diversion — hidden Wakanda, vibranium, action detours (including a mad car-chase scramble in South Korea) but mostly set in a kind of tribal, primal heaven-on-earth.

I’m telling you right now that I’m more down with Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp, sight unseen, than Ryan Coogler‘s allegedly slambang Black Panther, which I won’t see for another two or three hours. Because it’s (a) obviously invested in the same wry comedic attitude that the original had, and (b) it’s clearly not solemn or portentous. The only thing I’m not sure of is Evangeline Lilly, who seems a little too snitty and frosty.

Ant-Man: “Hold on, you gave her wings?” Hank Pym: “And blasters.” Ant-Man: “So you didn’t have that tech available for me?” Pym: “No, I did.”

Is it really all that important to have Twitter-follower bragging rights? To some it obviously is, even to the extent of paying to acquire “fake” followers, as a 1.27.18 N.Y. Times story reported.

But if you’re a big-city, brand-name film critic like Richard Roeper, who’s been a Chicago Sun Times columnist, critic and book author since the late ’80s, who cares if you have 25,000 or 250,000 followers? If I were to pay for an extra 20K followers, how would this help my game in the great scheme?

It was reported yesterday that the Chicago Sun-Times will no longer be publishing anything by Roeper until it completes an investigation of his Twitter followers. Roeper was named in that Times story about the buying and selling of fake Twitter followers.

Chicago Sun Times editor-in-chief Chris Fusco: “We became aware over the weekend of issues relating to Rich Roeper’s Twitter account. We’re investigating these issues. We will not be publishing any reviews or columns by Rich until this investigation is complete.”

Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther had its big Los Angeles premiere last night. Right after a chorus of invested, eager-beaver critics tweeted what could modestly be described as over-the-rainbow responses. But you can’t rely on media types who were primed to worship it going in (along with those who were inclined to love it for reasons of representation and whatnot). Remember the ecstatic, holy-moley, touching-God tweets that poured into the twitterverse after the Last Jedi premiere at the Shrine?

The only thing that matters in the end is the opinion of the hard guys (those who assess a film straight from the shoulder sans agendas, and primarily in terms of filmmaking expertise and classic chops), and you’d better believe that Hollywood Elsewhere is among this fraternity. HE is seeing Black Panther tonight on the Disney lot, and then we’ll see what goes. Harumph.

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There’s a new Region 2 Bluray of Tony Richardson‘s The Border, but no Region 1 version for the U.S. The Universal release was a bust (cost $22 million, grossed $6 million). Possibly because Jack Nicholson was somewhat miscast as a mopey border guard who experiences a compassionate moral epiphany after witnessing brutal treatment of Mexican immigrants by his colleagues.

Miscast because Nicholson was too closely identified with perverse behavior at the time, mostly due to his Jack Torrance role in The Shining, but also because of a series of jaded, cynical malcontents like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Badass Buddusky in The Last Detail, Jake Gittes in Chinatown, Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the horse thief in The Missouri Breaks, etc.

Photo taken by Mitch Neuhauser, who’s now managing director of Cinemacon.

This issue arose when I interviewed Nicholson on a very cold January morning at the Carlyle hotel, way up on the 23rd floor. I asked for his reaction to Richard Corliss‘s Time review of The Border. Jack said he hadn’t read it so I showed it to him. The review began as follows:

“When, early in The Border, Nicholson muses about how, back in California, ‘I liked feeding those ducks,’ one’s first reaction is: ‘Feeding them what? Strychnine?’ Nicholson’s voice, with the silky menace of an FM disc jockey in the eighth circle of hell, has always suggested that nothing in the catalogue of experience is outrageous enough to change his inflection. Even when he goes shambly and manic (Goin’ South, The Shining), Nicholson’s voice and those tilde eyebrows give the impression…” and blah blah.

Nicholson chuckled faintly and rolled his eyes when he read it, and then went into a minor tirade about how he was “mad” that he’d convinced the public he was a murderer, and about being stuck in that box. This image disappeared the following year, of course, after he played Garret Breedlove, the randy ex-astronaut, in James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment.

Yeah, this was the same Carlyle interview that I’ve mentioned two or three times in this space. The one in which I told Nicholson that aspects of his Shining performance seemed, to me, to be a kind of inside joke. Nicholson disputed this. He wasn’t rude but his response was basically who was I, a mere journalist, to assume I had an inside view of things? He was relaxed and droll about it, but his point was that he was “inside” and I wasn’t.

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On 3.5.14 Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Steven Spielberg was pondering a remake of West Side Story for 20th Century Fox. Two days ago a West Side Story casting notice was posted on Twitter by casting director Cindy Tolan, announcing that Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner were the principals, and that they’re looking for Caucasian actors to audition for Tony (i.e., Richard Beymer‘s part in the 1961 Robert Wise big-screen version) and Latino actors to play Maria, Anita and Bernardo (played by Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno and George Chakiris way back when).

Remaking West Side Story for the screen is a bad enough idea on its own. It would have zero connection to any aspect of today’s culture, for one thing. There’s certainly no trace of gang culture in 2018 Manhattan. Maybe the angle behind the Spielberg-Kushner version is to shoot it in period (i.e., sometime in the early to mid ’50s)? If so that could work. But will Kushner dispense with phrases like “play it cool, daddy-o”? Some of the dialogue in the ’61 film made horses choke even back then.

Who except boomers and older GenXers would be interested in a reboot of (take your pick) the original 1957 stage musical or the ’61 screen version? In the case of those who were teenagers in the mid ’90s and are now pushing 40, who’s clamoring for a Stephen Sondheim-Leonard Bernstein musical version of Baz Luhrman‘s Romeo + Juliet (’96)?

True, Wise’s ’61 version seems stiff and inorganic and overly theatrical by today’s standards. The challenge, I suppose, would be to make a version that feels more “street” and set it against a real-life culture where gang warfare, turf battles and racial animosity are (or more precisely were) regular facts of life.

But this kind of thing seems way out of Spielberg’s wheelhouse. What does a suburban Jewish kid from Arizona know about mid 20th Century gang culture anyway? Of all the directors in all the world who could possibly pull this off, Spielberg would have to be at the bottom of the list. Helming a new West Side Story would arouse every treacly, gooey, sentimental impulse in his system.

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James Franco‘s un-person status in the Hollywood realm, a result of five allegations of sexual misconduct that broke on 1.11.18, led to his being digitally removed from Vanity Fair‘s special Hollywood issue cover, according to a story by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Chris Gardner.

“According to multiple sources familiar with the shoot, Franco sat for [the] photo shoot and interview and was to be featured in the magazine’s Annie Leibovitz-shot portfolio,” Gardner writes. “He was removed from the cover digitally, however, due to allegations of sexual misconduct that surfaced in the wake of his Golden Globe win for The Disaster Artist.

“Subjects for the Vanity Fair cover are often photographed separately in small groups and combined via digital imaging — Franco’s removal, then, did not require a reshoot. That said, it’s highly unusual for a star to be removed from an elaborate photo layout, especially so close to publication.”

Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27) has to try and top the last MI film and the one before that and before that and yaddah yaddah. And yet stunt-wise, the bell tolled twice for Cruise during the shooting of this latest installment. He was seriously injured last August and — according to TMZ — got hurt again a few days ago. The man is 55 — he’ll be 56 in July. Tragic as this may seem, Cruise is being told by God, biology and fate to steer his energies away from energizer-bunny action flicks.

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Oscar-wise, it appears as if Laurie Metcalf‘s neurotic, tour de force Lady Bird performance is going to lose to Allison Janney‘s cigarette-smoking monster mom in I, Tonya. I wish it were otherwise, but the writing is clearly on the wall.

And the reason has just hit me. People don’t just vote for performances but for the characters, and most Academy members like largeness and intensity. They’ll vote for characters who are lovable or emotionally vulnerable on some level, and also for ones who’ve delivered a certain eccentric theatricality or campy trippiness. But they won’t vote for characters who make them feel badly or remind them of unpleasant frictions.

I suspect that Metcalf’s caring but high-strung and badgering mom hits too close to the bone for a lot of voters out there, particularly women who had contentious relationships with their own mothers when they were younger. They’re sensing emotional reality in her performance, of course, but also the guilt-tripping, shade-throwing and high-strung agitation, and they can’t quite “like” her character because it stirs unpleasant memories.

Janney’s character is a fiend — an awful mother and far more dislikable than Metcalf but also safely broad and evil and grand guignol-ish. In this sense she’s less real and relatable and less disturbing than Metcalf, and at the same time offering more of a show — “Look at how detestable I can be! Am I a hoot or what?”

Late this afternoon I caught Ethan Hawke‘s Blaze, a seriously authentic-feeling biopic about the still relatively unknown country-soul singer Blaze Foley, who died from a gunshot wound in 1989.

It almost goes without saying that films about musicians will focus on boozy, self-destructive behavior — Walk The Line, Bird, I Saw The Light, Payday, Michael Apted‘s Stardust, The Joker Is Wild, etc. But Blaze feels home-grown and self-owned in a subdued sort of way. It has a downmarket, lived-in vibe. I wasn’t exactly “entertained”, but every line, scene and performance felt honest and unforced.

(l. to r.) Blaze star Ben Dickey, cowriter Sybil Rosen, director-cowriter Ethan Hawke.

Gifted but temperamental with a serious booze problem, Foley (Ben Dickey) never really got rolling as a recording artist, but he was a well-respected outlaw artist with a certain following in the ’70s and ’80s. Dickey’s purry singing style, similar to Foley’s, reminds me of a sadder Tony Joe White (“Polk Salad Annie”).

Hawke focuses on the guy’s soft, meditative side and particularly his relationship with real-life ex Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat). He gets a truly exceptional performance out of Dickey, a hulking, elephant-sized musician who’s never acted prior to this. Dickey’s Foley is such a good fit — centered, settled, unhurried — that I nearly forgot about the bulk factor.

Blaze offers noteworthy supporting perfs from Kris Kristofferson (as Foley’s dad), Sam Rockwell, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn (as a trio of record company partners) and Josh Hamilton, among others.

The script was co-written by Hawke and Rosen, author of a relationship memoir titled titled “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley“. You can just sense that Hawke knows musician behavior like his own. Hell, I was one myself (i.e., a mediocre drummer) for a while, and know the turf to some extent, and it all feels right.

Does the 127-minute length seem a bit long? Maybe. I was talking to a couple of critics who felt this way. I wasn’t bothered — the laid-back pacing agrees with the rural milieu and contemplative, occasionally surly country-dude attitude.

There’s a documentary called Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, directed by Kevin Triplett and released in 2011.

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I’m not feeling the hunger today. I feel a bit drained. I’m just gonna see what I can at a casual pace. Nobody’s in a hurry, everyone’s an adult. Jason Reitman‘s Tully (Focus, 4.20) will screen at the Eccles early Thursday evening (6:30 pm).

The weather has been in the low 30s and 20s and even the high teens late at night. These shorts were being worn yesterday by a Sundance volunteer.

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