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The Cannes Film Festival guys have confirmed that the usual May timeslot has been tossed. This year the 2021 festival will happen between July 6th and 17th, they’re saying. That’s a little more than five months hence. As I’ve already explained, Cannes in July is a fantasy…a child’s dream. We won’t be free of this hellish Covid nightmare for at least another seven or eight months, if that. We may not be completely shorn of masks until early or even mid ’22.

Let’s imagine that the Cannes Film Festival happens anyway, Covid be damned. They’d still have to enforce social distance seating in the Grand Lumiere, and how the hell would that work? There could be no crowding around the ropes in front of the Salle Debussy. Obviously no gatherings at La Pizza, and no parties to speak of. No crowds of diners jammed together and popping bottles of wine in the restaurant district. No press conferences. Forget it. Next year is the best hope.

Sam Levinson, John David Washington and Zendaya meet John Cassevetes, Ingmar Bergman, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a prolonged, soul-draining, “you give me nothing but pain and lethargy and despair” fuck-you argument film, shot inside Carmel’s “Caterpillar house” and captured on luscious black-and-white celluloid.

Malcolm & Marie (Netflix, 1.29) isn’t half bad as a penitentiary exercise yard film — a “we’ve got some money and a cool location and nothing else to do because of Covid so let’s shoot this sucker and hope for the best.”

It isn’t bad for a two-hander in which the combatants piss into each other’s souls for 106 minutes as they say (a) you’re an obnoxious asshole, (b) you don’t sufficiently value who I am or what I’m about, (c) life is struggle and toil and trouble, and you’d better man up and get used to that, (d) you’d do well to get past yourself and your swollen bullshit ego, etc. Bitter pissed-off resentful wake up go to hell oh God you’re stabbing me in the ribs and kicking me in the teeth, etc.

Not to sound petty but I lost interest when Washington sat down at the dining table and began to wolf down a bowl of macaroni and cheese. I hate it when people wolf their food, on-screen or at home or anywhere. I’d like to add a new Hollywood Elsewhere slogan — “no wolfing of any kind of meal and especially macaroni and cheese.”

The general rule of table etiquette is “always eat sparingly”. Always little half bites, if that. In fact don’t eat at all. In fact, I don’t want to see anyone in a movie eat food ever.

If Cary Grant had sat down in the middle of North by Northwest and started wolfing a bowl of macaroni and cheese, the movie would’ve tanked and his career would’ve been over.

HE to journo pally: Do I understand correctly that you believe Zendaya is some kind of Best Actress contender? Did I miss something? Is this “Be Kind to Marginally Talented Actresses Who Began As Dancers'” month?

She tries to act but she can’t strike a match. Ingrid Bergman, she’s not. She has glassy shark eyes. She has three arrows in her quiver, three modes within her range of expression. Sarcastic belittling attitude pout. Frosty, resentful anger pout. And silent weeping in the bathtub.

Plus her hairline is right on top of her eyebrows. You know how they used to say Claudette Colbert had no neck? And the same about Mickey Spillane? Zendaya barely has a forehead. Okay, she has one in the middle section but not on the sides.

She’s a flavor of the month-slash-flash in the pan who lucked out when Levinson cast her as a druggie in Euphoria, and then Levinson got the idea that she could handle a Liz Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-level virtuoso performance. Not on this planet.

Honestly? Washington the macaroni wolfer isn’t that great either. Yes, he’s better than Zendaya but that’s not saying all that much. At least he’s energetic. At least he doesn’t pout.

Did I hate Malcolm & Marie? No, I didn’t. It was okay while it lasted, but it’s nothing to jump up and down about. I occasionally texted while I watched it — I’m just being honest.

A couple of days ago Josh Dickey, a respected entertainment and social media realm editor (Mashable, TheWrap, Variety) and veteran journalistic presence around town, announced on Facebook that he’s embarked on a new career path.

Dickey is now specializing in HVAC/R engineering, or the installment and maintenance of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration.

Why is he out of the Hollywood racket? The impression I’m getting is that he’s the wrong color and the wrong age, and is assessing the world in the wrong way. It would appear (and I’m stressing the “a” word) that no matter how smart and highly credentialed they might be, straight, middle-aged white guys aren’t being hired much these days. Especially if the white guy in question is more of a discerning, Bari Weiss-leaning centrist or libertarian than a wokester.

The Khmer Rouge wants to more or less eliminate guys like this, or at least seriously thin their ranks. And if you complain you’ll be laughed out of the room and probably end up in an even worse spot for your trouble.

Here’s how Dickey put it: “Everything you hear about media bias is ten times worse when looking out from the inside, [and] the homogeny of the industry’s worldview had become hostile to my center, libertarian, rugged individualist leanings, a dissonance that was manifesting everywhere I went. ‘They’ wanted me to write about social justice [while] I prefer to seek truth, and so something had to give.**

Josh Dickey, formerly of Mashable, TheWrap, Variety, et.al.

“Not that the media, spattering grease fire that it has become, would have me. I’m not the right make, model and year anymore. That’s not something I’m whining about — it’s just a stone fact. Ten years ago I was beating back recruiters. My resume is a garden of journalistic delights and editorial accomplishments, and I’ll always be proud of those.

But during the past couple of years, I have applied for more than 100 media jobs — roles I was uniquely qualified for — and not a single interview or lead has come of it. I mean crickets, folks. Because, let’s face it, HR won’t look past my LinkedIn profile picture. Not in this climate.”

A year or so ago I passed along an anecdote from an east-coast critic friend who said that a job-seeking colleague had been told point blank by Variety critic Peter Debruge that as far as critic stringer postions are concerened, Variety is looking to only (or primarily) hire women and POCs. When I shared this anecdote with a journo colleague his response was “I don’t know that I trust that story” or “that doesn’t sound like Debruge” or words to that effect.

Today I was told that a rep for another entertainment-industry publication had explicitly stated in an email that their unspoken hiring policy is focused more or less entirely upon women and POCS. Because if it got around that this publication isn’t dedicated to hiring these two categories of job applicants or aren’t giving them full and fair consideration, they’d be DEAD in the Twitter water.

And white guys can’t beef about this because they’ll sound wimpy and whiny and…well, lacking a sense of irony. They’d sound ungracious and entitled. The applicable phrase is “a taste of your own medicine, fuckface.”

Khmer Rouge cadres to middle-aged white guy job applicants: “For decades you and your buddies (not to mention your fathers and grandfathers) were at the front of the line…now you’re at the back of it. It’s that simple And if you don’t like it, tough. You’ll take it and like it.”

So combine (a) the earlier, second-hand Debruge anecdote (however accurate it may or may not be) with (b) Dickey’s statement and (c) what I’ve been told about the hiring philosophy at a certain publication, and you’ve got three blades of grass…three blades that suggest there’s a whole lawn’s worth of attitudes out there…attitudes that basically say “older white guys can suck on it.”

We all want a fair and equal playing field when it comes to hiring, but we now seem to be in a phase in which straight white guys appear to have taken on the status of targeted must-to-avoids — actively discriminated against because they’re not black or female. Or are simply too “straight” or aren’t, you know, gay enough. Or because vaguely centrist or conservative-minded fellows just don’t fit in these days. Or some combination of the above.

As Henry Hill said in Act Three of Goodfellas, “These are the bad times.”

There’s no place for White Guys With Opinions anymore. Unless you’re someone like myself, I suppose, but don’t think things aren’t tough in my corner as well. I’ve been grappling with punitive Khmer Rouge backhands and freeze-outs for a solid three years and counting.

There are certain outfits in the industry that aren’t even trying to hide this bias. If (and I say “if”) someone were to present an email from an entertainment or media-related company that said in so many words that they’re only interested in hiring women and POCs these days, a guy could theoretically hire a labor lawyer and sue. Expressly not even considering hiring a job applicant due to gender and/or skin color…that’s about as litigious as it gets.

But white guys can’t do this because people would say “how dare you? You and your kind swaggered around for decades, and now that the tables are turning you’re upset? Man up, you fucking child. Take a course in sensitivity training, read Robin D’Angelo‘s ‘White Fragility’ and shove it up your ass…you’ve had your day and now it’s time for guys like yourself to step aside and wait your turn.”

** For more on this, Dickey wrote, see Bari Weiss’ brilliant resignation letter.

Last night the New York Film Critics posted a video that saluted the 2020 awards winners and gave them a forum to say “many thanks, deeply grateful,” etc. Hollywood Elsewhere congratulates all the winners and also-rans. And congratulations to longtime NYFCC member Marshall Fine for shooting and assembling the below video — clean, classy, succinct.

But as long as we’re discussing the NYFCC and last month’s award announcements, it’s fair to repeat an opinion that I posted on 12.18.20.

Starting in ‘18 and concurrent with rising wokeness, the NYFCC awards began to move beyond eccentricity and into knee-jerk virtue signalling. In the same way that everyone in the entertainment industry is currently emphasizing the hiring of women and POCs, the NYFCC’s 2020 award choices were mostly at least partly about kowtowing to sacred p.c. cows.

The Best Picture winner, Kelly Reichardt‘s First Cow, is a respected, finely crafted but rather somber mood trip about a mid 19th Century relationship film that…uhm, was faintly gayish but not acted upon? It bears the Reichardt stamp, you bet — quiet, studied, authentic but radiating a kind of chaste, closed-off feeling. I was mystified stunned when the NYFCC chose it above Nomadland, Mangrove, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, Mank, etc.

I also scratched my head when Sidney Flannigan, star of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, won for Best Actress. Flannigan was playing a sadly damaged, extremely stand-offish character, but she barely emoted except in that one scene in which the abortion clinic lady asked those probing questions. Obviously an emotional keeper — it got to everyone — and I fully believed all of Flannigan’s scenes, but I never even considered the possibility of her winning anything, due respect. The last time I checked Best Actress awards were supposed to be about more than just the emotional impact of a single scene.

And Maria Bakalova won for Best Supporting Actress in the Borat sequel because she and Sascha Baron Cohen punked Rudy Giuliani and because her character stood up for herself as a strong and independent thinker? Out of all the worthy Best Supporting Actress performances to be seen in 2020 they chose Baklava’s? The award belonged to Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried or The Father‘s Olivia Colman.

These and some other calls, due respect, struck me as more than the usual quirky elitism. The 2020 NYFCC awards were about members fortifying their progressive credentials and their progressive vision of life (call it a party platform) in 2021.

Da 5 Bloods costar Delroy Lindo gave a vigorous, blustery, scattershot performance. I respect the first 50% or 60% of Da 5 Bloods, but I believe it’s been celebrated mainly because of last summer’s George Floyd tragedy and the subsequent BLM demonstrations, and because of Spike Lee‘s no-brainer decision to blend his story with issues of POC identity and certain ghosts of the past, and what was happening in the streets.

I’ve been saying this for three or four years, but the NYFCC members seem to live in their own rarified realm, and all they want to do is blow people’s minds (or certainly mine). They’ve almost become as weird as the LAFCA foodies Their awards are almost entirely about choosing the most socially deserving recipients. Feminism because sexism must be defeated, and support for black people any which way because of BLM. It’s all political.

When the NYFCC gave the Best Actress award to Regina Hall in 2018’s Support The Girls instead of Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me, I threw up my hands. A day after that awards announcement Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn implored me to watch Support The Girls and I did — it’s a decent little film and Hall is very good in it. But good enough to warrant a Best Actress award from the NYFCC?

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Four days ago Ben Kenigsberg posted a N.Y. Times piece about Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder (’59). It praises the Jimmy Stewart courtroom drama, which costarred Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick and George C. Scott. It especially admires Preminger’s willingness to “trust [that] audiences will dwell in gray areas.”

Here’s a passage that made me sit up: “While some other Preminger films of the era (’58’s Bonjour Tristesse, ’59’s Porgy and Bess) used widescreen formats like CinemaScope or Todd-AO, Anatomy of a Murder instead favors claustrophobic compositions that ask viewers to judge several characters’ reactions at once.”

Excuse me but if Kenigsberg had tracked down the boxy (1.37:1) version of Anatomy of a Murder, which is only available on a 21-year-old Sony Home Video 480p DVD, he would have realized that in no way, shape or form is this a claustrophobically-framed film. It’s actually loose and roomy and quite relaxed and laid-back…in my view the exact opposite of cramped and congested. Because it has room to move and room to breathe…because it inhales and exhales that northern Michigan air like a jazz-loving attorney on a fishing trip.

Here’s how I explained it nine years ago:

“Otto Preminger‘s 1959 film looks sublime at 1.37. Needle sharp and comfortable with acres and acres of head space. Plus it’s the version that was shown on TV for decades. It looks stodgy and kind of grandfatherly, true, but that’s fine because it’s your grandfather’s movie in a sense. Boxy is beautiful.

“It is perverse if not diseased for Criterion to deliver their 2012 Bluray version — obviously the best that Anatomy of a Murder has ever looked on home screens — with one third of the originally captured image chopped off. Flip the situation over and put yourself in the shoes of a Criterion bigwig and ask yourself, ‘Where is the harm in going with the airier, boxier version?’ Answer: ‘No harm at all.’ Unless you’re persuaded by the 1.85 fascist cabal that a 1.37 aspect ratio reduces the appeal of a Bluray because the 16 x 9 plasma/LED/LCD screen won’t be fully occupied.”

The above comparison show that cropping the image down to 1.85 from 1.37 doesn’t kill the visual intention. In the 1.85 version Stewart simply has less breathing room above and below his head. But the comparison below makes my case. Consider a scene between Stewart and Gazarra in a small jail cell. The boxier version is clearly the preferred way to go. It feels natural and plain. The 1.85 version delivers a feeling of confinement, obviously, but Otto Preminger wasn’t an impressionist. He was a very matter-of-fact, point-focus-and-shoot type of guy.”

I was heartened by the Biden-Harris inauguration, of course, but the most encouraging interlude of the entire day was the initial press briefing by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki — a forum for information, actual facts as opposed to alternative facts, respectful, intelligent, wonky, a bit boring, honest as far as it went, non-combative. In short it was the first White House press briefing in four years that wasn’t a farce or a forehead-slapper or some kind of shit show. Very comforting.

Due respect to producer Lynda Obst and exec producer Michelle Pfeiffer, but I’m having trouble remembering much about Michael Hoffman‘s One Fine Day. I didn’t dislike it, but it was kind of a “uh-huh, okay” by way of a chaotic romcom.

It focused on two single parents (George Clooney, Michelle Pfeiffer) struggling to juggle work and kid chores as they slowly (half-heartedly?) fall in love.

The 1996 Fox release made $46 million domestic, which was considered disappointing. Raising kids can be exhausting, at times even soul-draining…we all know this. That’s pretty much all the film conveyed. It was okay, I felt, but it got killed critically.

The best thing about One Fine Day is the final scene. Just as romantic sparks are about to manifest, Clooney and Pfeiffer fall asleep on the couch. That’s single parenting!

I showed One Fine Day at my Woodland Hills-based film series, called “Hot Shot Movies.” Obst graciously agreed to drop by for a post-screening q & a.

8 year-old Jett and 7 year-old Dylan attended also. They were fidgeting and fighting during the Obst appearance and embarrassing me to all to hell. Obst saved the day by speaking to them directly over the mike with the whole crowd listening — “Don’t do this when we’re talking, boys…be respectful.” And they shut right up! Hail Lynda!

If I were Joe I would install an anti-Trump, JFK-nostalgia color scheme in the Oval Office — subdued olive-green curtains, subdued grayish carpet with a hint of sea-green, off-white matching couches. A color scheme that (a) soothes and assures and (b) announces that Trump has been totally erased and heave-ho’ed. That means no effing gold.

People‘s Ale Russian is reporting that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas have concluded that their relationship (aka “Benana”) was “a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.” That’s Cole Porter-ese for splitsville.

Their affair kicked in while costarring in Adrian Lyne‘s Deep Water, an erotic thriller that began shooting in New Orleans on 11.4.19. So it lasted roughly a year, perhaps a little more.

“Source” to Russian: “Ben is no longer dating Ana. She broke it off. Their relationship was complicated.” HE translation: They were fighting tooth and nail. Kicker: “Ana doesn’t want to be Los Angeles-based and Ben obviously has to since his kids live in Los Angeles.”

Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas.

HE completely and wholeheartedly guarantees that “Ana doesn’t want to settle in Los Angeles” was not a big factor in the breakup. At most it was an “also” factor. I’m guessing it had something to do with Ben’s demons (“Ben continues to want to work on himself”), and a little something to do with Ana’s Cuban blood, which can run suddenly hot and then cold. You know that expression “crazy Cubans”?

The People story reports that de Armas moved into Affleck’s Los Angeles home last August, or roughly five months ago. Plus “a source previously confirmed to People she [had] placed her Venice, California, home on the market.”

Ana wouldn’t have done that if she wasn’t totally sold on Benana. Most prudent people in a newish relationsbip would take things one step at a time and keep the Venice home in case things don’t work out, But she’s Cuban so she went in whole hog.

I adore you, you’re perfect, we’re soulmates, daily orgasms, life is heavenly, I’ll move in and we’ll be together for years…nope! Changed my mind after four or five months of cohabitation.

How will the bust-up affect Affleck’s Best Actor campaign for his performance in The Way Back? Not to sound crass or cynical but I think people will now feel sorry for the guy to some extent. Sympathy votes! The reverse would be true if he had dumped Ana, but she gave him his walking papers. Or at least, that’s what they’re saying.

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Great gushing cloudbursts are few and far between in my neck of the woods. I’m not talking about simple drenchings, which happen every so often — I’m talking cats and dogs, the wild Parasite rainstorm, monsoon-level, The Rains of Ranchipur and how this never happens in WeHo.

When you get right down to it I’ve experienced only five or six gully washers over the last 20 or 30 years, and almost all of them overseas. There was one serious soaking in Manhattan in the spring of ’81, when I was living on Bank Street. And a major cloudburst in Las Vegas back in the ’90s. But I wouldn’t describe either as super-exceptional.

The greatest urban rainstorm happened in Paris in the summer of ’03. Dylan I were living on a hilly street in southwest Montmartre — 23 rue Tourlaque. It was coming down so hard that the gutters were swamped with charging rapids. And the cacophony (trillions of water bullets clattering on hundreds of clay-tile rooftops) was magnificent. And the crackling thunder before it started. The wrath of an angry Old Testament God from a Cecil B. DeMille film.

The most exciting deluge in a forest primeval setting happened about 10 years later, in Vietnam. In a jungle-like area not far from the Mausoleum of Emperor Minh Mang, just south of Hue. We took shelter inside a kind of makeshift cafe — open air, plastic tables and chairs, a slanted wood-frame roof covered with palm fronds and banana leaves. The sheer energy of the downpour plus the overwhelming symphony of sound (half raging waterfall, half Noah’s Ark flood waters)…must have lasted a good 15 or 20 minutes.

23 rue Tourlaque, Paris.

That madman shot of Armie Hammer is like that 1969 Life magazine photo of Charles Manson. It’s going to appear again and again, and is obviously going to make things worse for the poor guy. Right now he’s being sliced and diced by social media carnivores. In a text he called himself a sexual “cannibal” — obviously an allusion to carniverous cunnilingus. He’s apparently a “dominant”, and yes, his [allegedly] stated appetites sound like the voltage was turned up too high. So yeah, he’s on the pervy side. But haven’t his affairs and assignations been consensual? What did he do to deserve to be ripped apart like an impala being disembowled by wild dogs? Who’s behind this? What’s the motive?

Regina King‘s One Night in Miami, which I saw and reviewed four months ago, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. I haven’t re-watched it, but it’s best to trust your initial reaction. Here’s what I said:

Variety award-season columnist Clayton Davis was apparently floating on a cloud while writing his review of Regina King‘s One Night In Miami, calling it “the first solid Oscar contender to drop in the fall festival circuit.”

All right, let’s calm down. Yes, this is a respectable, well-acted film in a disciplined and concentrated sort of way. But as interesting as it is and as admired as King may be for doing a better-than-decent job, One Night in Miami is basically a stage play and that shit only goes so far.

I don’t know how to explain it in so many words, but I somehow expected that a film about a February 1964 meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room would amount to something more than what this movie conveys.

Playwright Kemp Powers has adapted his 2013 play about African American identity in the ’60s.The result is not great or brilliant, but it’s good enough in terms of observational fibre and social relevance, or at least the second half is. But the fact that it was directed by King doesn’t make it any more or less than what it actually is.

And for a film that largely (65% or 70%) takes place in a single hotel room, it visually underwhelms. Tami Reiker‘s cinematography doesn’t match the high water marks of Boris Kaufman‘s one-room lensing of 12 Angry Men or Glen MacWilliams‘ cinematography for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.

Denzel Washington’s titular performance in Spike Lee‘s Malcolm X was a tougher and more resolute dude than Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s version. Malcolm won’t stop beating up on poor Sam Cooke, and he seems weak when he asks Cassius (“Cass”) to join him in breaking with Elijah Muhammad. And he weeps! Just not the solemn, heroic figure that I’ve been reading about all these years. And wasn’t he wearing that carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard in ‘64?

Good moment: When Cooke criticizes Malcolm for reacting in a cold, racially dismissive way when JFK was murdered (“The chickens coming home to roost”). Cooke says his mother cried over the news, and Clay says his momma cried too.

Leslie Odom, Jr. is quite good as Cooke, but I didn’t believe an early scene at the Copacabana in which the snooty white clientele reacts to Cooke’s singing with derision and rudeness. In ’64 Cook was known all over as a major-league crooner who had released a cavalcade of hits going back to ‘57. No way would an audience of uptown swells treat him like that. Even if they didn’t like his act, the middle-class politeness instinct is too embedded.

I felt the same contemptuous attitude toward whiteys in the Copa scene that Ava DuVernay showed when she invented that Selma scenario in which LBJ told J. Edgar Hoover to tape-record MLK’s sexual motel encounters in order to pressure him into not pushing for the Voting Rights Act. You’ll recall how Joseph Califano called b.s. on that.

The postscript reminds that Malcolm X was murdered by gunfire a year later, but it ignores Cooke’s death in Los Angeles less than a year later. That tells you that King is a bit of a spinner — she didn’t want to leave the audience with a downish, mystifying epilogue. But it happened.

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