I need to say this carefully so I don’t get in trouble. Keanu Reeves is 56, fairly loaded and in reasonably good physical shape. The usual thing for a studly-spiritual hetero movie star of his age is to partner with a classy, curvaceous hottie who’s at least 10 or 15 or even 20 years younger. If Keanu was with a 35 year-old the paparazzi would shrug. Sometimes middle-aged actors will even do a Dennis Quaid (i.e., pair up with a 20something.)

But it’s a very rare thing for a guy like Keanu to hold hands at a big public event like the LACMA Art + Film Gala with a woman who…uhm, doesn’t fit the mold.

Her name is Alexandra Grant, a 46-year-old artist-designer. Besides being Keanu’s creative collaborator (she’s illustrated two Reeves books, Ode to Happiness and Shadows) she’s also his girlfriend. Let’s just say that Reeves, Hugh Jackman and Pierce Brosnan are in the same approximate boat, significant-other-wise. And there’s nothing the least bit wrong with that.

One year away from the 2020 election, a Washington Post-ABC News poll of registered voters has found that Mayor Pete is polling ahead of President Trump by 11 percent — 52% to 41%.

Droolin’ Joe, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are running strongest against The Beast nationally, with Biden leading by 17 points (56% to 39%), Warren by 15 points (55% to 40%) and Sanders by 14 points (55% to 41%).

But Biden is a slow-mo train wreck/gaffe machine, and his lead is partly if not largely due to stubborn black voters refusing to reassess. Am I encouraged that Warren takes Trump by 15%? Yes, definitely. But you know she’s vulnerable with Medicare For Life, the Pocahantas thing and that schoolmarm voice. And we all know that Bernie won’t make it because of the heart attack.

I don’t know which is a scarier one-on-one debate prospect, Trump vs. Biden or Trump vs. Warren.

Does it bother anyone at all that Trump, Biden, Bernie and Warren are all in their 70s, and that the 70 year-old Warren is younger than Biden by seven years? Executive- or management-performance levels peak when people are in their mid 40s to mid 60s.

How about electing a President who’s below retirement age?

Pete, I’m dead certain, would kick the tar out of Trump in a debate — ten times brighter, better educated, more mature and composed, military background.

Bad Boys For Life (Columbia, 1.17.20) is obviously a gaudy and shameless cash grab by a couple of over-the-hillies whose careers have been downswirling for quite some time.

Will BBFL “open” regardless of quality? As the core audience has been known for occasionally stupid and gullible allegiances, yeah…probably.

How do I know for certain that Bad Boys For Life is second- if not third-tier stuff? Because of what the trailer shows, and especially how it’s cut. And also because it was directed by the Belgian-born Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. During his peak years (’93 to ’03) Smith wouldn’t have glanced at these guys. But things change.

When did I know that Smith would wind up screwing the pooch? When he passed on The Matrix to make Wild Wild West — that’s when I knew he would eventually sink into the swamp. Smith’s all-time peak moment came when he starred in Tony Scott‘s Enemy of the State (’98). His second-best was starring in Michael Mann‘s Ali (’01). And I’ll never forget how completely cool and transporting he was in Fred Schepisi‘s Six Degrees of Separation (’93).

Angsty Loner to Mr. Lonelyhearts: I’m 16, a high-school junior, and miserable. Partly (mostly?) due to the fact that my hormones are raging while my experience with hetero physical intimacy has been, shall we say, limited.

Which doesn’t mean I haven’t emotionally suffered over this or that dashed relationship. I’ve eaten my heart out over…I don’t know, seven or eight girls since the third grade. Maybe more. And none of the objects of my desire have been more than semi-interested, if that. Girls are fickle and flighty and all over the map, and at the end of the day I don’t seem to have what they want. Temporarily, I mean. Before their mood switches back again.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

I just re-watched this. On a certain level it’s hard to believe this is still a thing. But in the minds of many some, it still is. And there’s no talking to them about this, and I don’t want to go over the whole thing again. At all. But when you re-watch this, I just don’t sense any lying. Apart from what the New York and Connecticut investigators concluded or what Moses Farrow wrote or any of the rest of it, I’m not seeing or sensing the little tells that say “this guy is dodging something.” They just aren’t there.

The other takeaway is that there’s a huge difference in terms of biology, energy, alertness and mental acuity between a 57 year old and an 82 year old. I’m sorry but this is what I was thinking. Aging is such a bitch.

Posted today at 4 pm Pacific: “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

“It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

“And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in The Steel Helmet by Sam Fuller and Persona by Ingmar Bergman, in It’s Always Fair Weather by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, in Vivre Sa Vie by Jean-Luc Godard and The Killers by Don Siegel.”

HE insert: Scorsese prefers the drably photographed, TV-movie-ish version of The Killers just because Don Siegel directed it, and not Robert Siodmak‘s deliciously noirish The Killers (1946) with Burt Lancaster, Edmond O’Brien, Ava Gardner and Sam Levene?

Back to Scorsese: “Some say that Alfred Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

“They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

“Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

Another Farewell, right? I’m especially disinclined with Crazy Rich Asians‘ Michelle Yeoh and Henry Golding rounding out the cast. And I’m saying this as a heartfelt fan of The Farewell.

George Michael and Wham? Later.

Alternate plan: See it with a fair-minded attitude, and then trash it. Unless it’s good. But it can’t be with that cloying poster image.

Hollywood Elsewhere and the much-whispered-about Yamaha Rumblehog lost traction, tipped over and hit the floor sideways this morning. It happened in the underground parking lot of the Paradigm talent agency (8942 Wilshire) at 10:20 am. I banged my elbow slightly but no worries. Like a terrified animal about to be killed, the rumblehog pissed a pint of gas onto the floor when we hit the floor. I almost said ”Aagghh…act like a manly motorcycle and not some candy-ass scooter!”

I sustained no injuries, but I do blame the construction guys who built or remodeled the Pardigm garage because the floor is too slippery to corner with. Should I have noticed this and driven accordingly? Yes, but the floor is a lot smoother and slicker than other talent agency garages, and I’ve been to them all. They should post a sign at the entrance that says “WARNING TO MOTORCYCLISTS — extra-slick floor makes cornering dicey if not dangerous.”

Introducing Sasha Stone‘s Goldtripping.com, which will basically be recollections of 20 years of Oscar-blogging. Tonally and appearance-wise, it reminds me of Karina Longworth‘s “You Must Remember This.” I could do something like this, but I’ve already established an alternate site — i.e., HE Plus. The problem is that as relentless and devotional as I am about HE classic, I’m a procrastinating dilletante when it comes to HEplus.

Every day I tell myself, “I will stop slacking off with HEplus and become a born-again devotee.” Most days I fail to do this. I’m so angry at myself, so depressed, so mortified. The other day I literally slapped myself across the face. Some days I can barely stand to look in the mirror.

Henceforth I will commit myself, dammit, to mining one of four HEplus veins or topics — (a) A modest riff on any older film, “older” being defined as anything that’s opened commercially between 1915 and last month; (b) personal tales of this and that…true and clear stories about stuff that hurt at the time, and which still linger in some gnawing way; (c) a Miss Lonelyhearts relationship advice column — twice married, 45 years of sniffing and chasing, loving and losing and making mistakes…I can bang this out in my sleep… why not dispense some of this?; and (d) End-of-the-day video recaps of the day’s posts + other topics I didn’t get to.

Colorized photos usually look like what they are. But every so often one will look exactly (and I mean exactly) right, natural and un-pushed with precisely the right shade of skin. This one actually looks too good — if a Wild One unit still photographer had snapped this Brando portrait in color during filming (i.e., early ’53), it would’ve looked a tiny bit splotchy, slightly coarser.

To be fair, one example of the non-Michael Douglas-y approach to making movies has to be Ryan Reynolds. And certainly Robert De Niro during his paycheck phase of the early-to-late aughts. Post-Sleuth Michael Caine, or for most of his life. Cuba Gooding during his post-Jerry Maguire cash-in period. Everybody makes a crap movie now and then. Goes with the profession.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Sequels exist, as art and as business, to remind you of something that existed before. They are parasitical by design. That’s why, well into the ’90s (the era of Another 48 HRS, RoboCop 2 and Speed 2: Cruise Control), they were a form greeted with a mixture of (momentary) enthusiasm and (mostly) mockery.”

HE: There are still only two Star Wars movies of serious consequence — The Empire Strikes Back (which is approaching its 40th anniversary) and to a slightly lesser extent the original Star Wars: A New Hope. Some of the Star Wars films made over the last four decades have been marginally exciting or diverting or harmless as far as they went, but none even came close to packing the mythical cliffhanger punch of The Empire Strikes Back.

Since 1983 and the arrival of the mostly underwhelming Return of the Jedi, they’ve all been about one thing and one thing only — i.e., cashing in on the lore. And that, from my perspective, has never been a compelling thing to wade into.

Q: What’s in it for me?
A: Well, if you like it you’ll feel good and fulfilled. And if you don’t…well, not a whole lot. Ether way they basically just want your money.

Gleiberman: “Star Wars has come to represent a kind of capitalist religion: the notion that Hollywood can create a universe that’s so powerful, such a golden goose, that it never has to end.

“The birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in 2008, was a direct iteration of this philosophy, one that emerged in spirit out of what George Lucas had accomplished with his prequels. And in an odd way, it was the very mediocrity of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith that became central to their meaning in the global entertainment marketplace. The mediocrity suggested that when the brand is mythological enough, ‘if you build it, they will come…even if the films don’t measure up.’

HE: The general presumption is that Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were “summarily dismissed” from the Star Wars universe (i.e., an attempt to create a whole new world of Star Wars-like characters and narratives) because they weren’t able to shake off their drive and personality and become docile stooges for the Disney Empire — cogs in the corporate mechanism. They presumably wanted to do that to some extent, at least in the beginning stages, but it wasn’t in them. Their visions were too far afield of the generic Star Wars template.