Highway tolls are collected via E-ZPass (created in ’87) or by throwing coins into a metal bin. Human toll-collectors — people dressed in some dull gray uniform whom drivers literally hand coins to — are still around, I guess, but not, I would guess, for much longer.

Back in the pre-automated ’70s manned tollbooths were fairly common. On the Connecticut turnpike a red traffic light would beam as you approached the toll station. You would come to a halt, hand over 50 or 75 cents to the guy/gal, the light would turn green and you’d gun it.

One dusky evening in ’77 I was approaching a West Haven toll station on the Connecticut turnpike. I was driving my slightly dusty 1975 LTD station wagon, which always got lousy gas mileage. I realized a mile out that I didn’t quite have the full 50 cents, and I had no cash in the wallet. I was counting the coins as I approached…a quarter, a dime, a nickel and six pennies…no, seven pennies! Three cents short. I sure as shit wasn’t going to pull over and accept some kind of traffic summons for being three cents light…c’mon. So I decided to be Steve McQueen in The Getaway.

I pulled up to the booth and handed the guy 47 cents. I started to inch forward as he was counting and saying out loud “35, 40…hold on, hold on.” I hit the gas and the guy freaked — “Hey, wait a minute, whoa!” There was no gate so the red light and the violation alarm (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!) would have to go fuck themselves. I was Clyde Barrow after a bank robbery.

The booth guy went into fury mode…”Hey, hey…stohhhhp!…whoooaaa!” I looked in my rearview as I pulled away. The guy had stepped out of the booth and onto the road, standing in a half-crouch position…”whoooaaa!!”

I contemplated my situation as I drove away. I had just broken Connecticut state law and didn’t feel good about that. But there was something a bit wrong with that guy. I wasn’t a criminal. It wasn’t like I’d given him 12 or 13 cents or something. Who screams and shouts over a three-cent shortage? Within seconds I’d completely shorn myself of guilt over shortchanging the state, and decided that the toolbooth guy…that howling uniformed goon…was the asshole in this situation, not me.

Did the toll-booth guy get my license plate? (This was before the era of instant photographic capture.) Would he put in a call to the state police, telling them to pull over a young long-haired guy in a brown LTD wagon? I considered getting off the turnpike and driving for a few miles on local roads, just to be safe. Then I realized how loony-tunes that would be. The toll-booth guy was just an oddball freak, a lonely guy without a life or a sense of cosmic balance. I stayed on the turnpike and all was well.

But that haunted feeling of being a lawbreaker on the run is still with me.

Brad Gray‘s Ad Astra (Disney, 9.20) isn’t going to Telluride, despite my 7.25 suggestion-projection. And it seems as if Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts (Amazon, 11.12) is going there, to judge by two excerpts from Deadline and Hollywood Reporter stories.

Deadline‘s Andreas Wiseman: “The Tom Harper-directed movie has been widely tipped to debut at a major fall festival. Our sources indicate Telluride is currently in the plans, not least due to the higher presence of Academy voters at the Rocky Mountain fest.”

THR‘s Pamela Mclintock: “At the same time, Amazon continues to have major awards ambitions for The Aeronauts, which is tipped for play at both the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals. The adventure-drama reunites Jones and Redmayne for the first time since awards darling The Theory of Everything.”

HE’s latest Telluride roster (hat tip to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy):

Marriage Story, d: Noah Baumbach
Ford v Ferrari, d: James Mangold
Judy, d: Rupert Goold
Uncut Gems, d: The Safdies
Motherless Brooklyn, d: Edward Norton
The Truth, d: Kore-eda
The Aeronauts, d: Tom Harper
Wasp Network, d: Olivier Assayas
The Two Popes, d: Fernando Mereilles
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, d: Celine Sciamma
Pain and Glory, d: Pedro Almodovar
Parasite, d: Bong Joon-ho
Varda by Agnes, d: Agnes Varda

Ruimy email: “I’ve heard from more than one person that the new Baumbach is a masterpiece. Marriage Story is going to Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York. No other movie is doing that.”

Tatyana and I were in the second row during yesterday’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood screening. Five or six seats from the left-side aisle. Just before the lights dimmed four 20something chatty casuals — two dudes, two pretty girls — sat to our immediate left. “Troublemakers,” I muttered to myself as they were chit-chatting from the get-go. They’d stop for a while and then resume. Delightful.

About 90 minutes in the guys got up and left for a long stretch. (What kind of moron leaves a major hot-ticket film for 10 or 12 minutes?) Then the girls started talking again, and suddenly I’d had enough.

I leaned over, eyeballed the main offender and said, “Would you mind not talking, please? Thanks.” She responded with an eye-roll look that said “well, if you want to be an asshole about it, I guess we could stop talking, yeah…I mean, if you insist…God.”

Then their boyfriends came back, and maybe five minutes later the women were yapping again. I looked over at the loudest of the two and gave her a look that said “really? I asked you nicely before and you’re talking anyway?”

The guy next to me saw my expression, felt the vibe and said “calm down…calm down.” A part of me wanted to go all Don Logan on his ass, but my death-ray look had been sufficient, I felt, and I wanted to stay with the film.

Then the calm-down guy, having decided that my facial expression wasn’t chill enough, said, “Jesus, you’re gonna make a thing out of this?” He hadn’t been around for warning #1, of course. At the time he and the other guy were probably chit-chatting with each other in the men’s room.

The women were the main culprits. In my humble judgment they were (and probably still are) nothing less than Don Logans-in-training. Incapable of basic empathy, listening only to their own whims, appalled that anyone would suggest that they consider the feelings of others.

Textbook definition of ASPD, or antisocial personality disorder: “People with ASPD can’t understand others’ feelings. They’ll often break rules or make impulsive decisions without feeling guilty for the harm they cause.”

After exiting yesterday’s 5:30 pm show of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood at the Hollywood Arclight (theatre #13), I spotted a few dozen copies of a special promotional magazine lying on a table in the lobby. Obviously funded by Sony marketing and apparently edited by Quentin Tarantino, it’s a kind of mock fan magazine that sells the 1969 world of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton. A friend informs that the publication “was on every seat at the Chinese premiere [last] Monday night, kinda QT’s tip-of-the-hat to the 60’s era when movie programs were a regular thing for event and roadshow films.”

The magazine also contains ads for various Tarantino products — Red Apple cigarettes, Big Kahuna burgers, Wolf’s Tooth dog food. Here are some shots of the contents:

I’ve paid $39 and change for Tatyana and I to see the new Tarantino so I can “feel the room” (and I mean really feel it) with my very own insect antennae. In the heat of the day. It’ll still be light when we emerge.

Jesus, dawg…Wu Tang Clan punched through a quarter-century ago. Time flies, s’over before you know it, life is a moving train, etc. The new Straight Outta Compton, except it’s a Hulu miniseries instead of a stand-alone theatrical. So I guess it isn’t the new Straight Outta Compton. Plus it’s “fictionalized“…what?

I was moderately excited by those Tribeca Film Festival reviews of Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. They appeared after it screened at the Beacon Theatre on 4.28.19. I was especially aroused by opinions that the 4K remastering had to some degree improved and upticked Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, and generally made it look richer or more vivid or something in that realm.

I saw the 182-minute Final Cut last night at the Playa Vista IMAX facility, and there was no question it was an absolutely first–rate rendering of an acknowledged classic. But it was no upgrade over what I saw in 70mm at the Ziegfeld in August of ‘79. It looked exactly the same as it did back then, which is fine as far as it goes. But the 4K upgrade effect (otherwise known in HE Land as a 4K “bump”) didn’t manifest.

This isn’t any kind of problem, per se, as the film was magnificently shot to begin with. But last night’s presentation wasn’t, to my eyes, an “oh wow” thing. Maybe it’ll pop more when I watch the 4K disc at home. I’ve noticed this syndrome before — 4K HDR renderings can look more robust than a theatrical presentation.

I also have to state that the sound was markedly better — more distinct and impactful — at the Ziegfeld than it was last night. Here are four examples:

(1) During the opening sequence as the opening stanzas of “The End” are heard, I distinctly remember hearing an ultra-crisp rendering of John Densmore’s high-hat as it kept time with the beat of the song. I had listened to “The End” endlessly on headphones, but hearing it inside the Ziegfeld was a “whoa!” because Densmore’s high-hat had never before aurally LEAPT OUT — sitting in my seat at the Ziegfeld I knew I was hearing something new. But it didn’t leap out last night at the IMAX facility;

(2) There was a huge subwoofer rumble — something that came up from the floor and vibrated my ribs all to hell — inside the Ziegfeld when the patrol boat approached the post-battle havoc that had been created by Colonel Kilgore and his Air Cav troops. There was a distinct bassy rumble at the IMAX theatre when this moment arrived, but no super-bass vibration that matched the Ziegfeld effect;

(3) Martin Sheen’s narration was louder at the Ziegfeld — every vowel and syllable cut right into your eardrums. But last night he just sounded normal;

(4) It was quite the thing at the Ziegfeld when Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” suddenly stopped as Coppola cut to the villagers and the Viet Cong, and we could only hear a faint hint of Wagner in the distance — that aural contrast effect was more striking at the Ziegfeld 40 years ago than it was last night.

Overall my impression was “looks and sounds fine but I wasn’t blown away.” But maybe the 4K disc will provide the enhancement I was expecting.

A friend who knows all about projection reminds that impressions of restored films are sometimes “venue dependent.” So it’s possible, I suppose, that the IMAX guys just didn’t present the film as they should have. Who knows?

In a conversation with Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli, Venice Film Festival artistic director Albert Barbera has called Todd Phillips‘ Joker “a really surprising film….[actually] the most surprising film we’ve got this year…this one’s going straight to the Oscars even though it’s gritty, dark, violent. It has amazing ambition and scope.”

Really? Okay, but I wouldn’t call the 2018 Joker script I recently read a blueprint for greatness.

Barbera acknowledges that going into Venice competition situation is an unusual thing for a Warner Bros. film, but quotes Phillips as having said “I don’t care if I run the risk of not winning…why shouldn’t I go in competition when I know what we’ve I’ve got on our hands?”

As to Hollywood’s diminished presence this year, Barbera says “there is a strange situation this year with American cinema due to what’s happening in the industry. There’s an earthquake undermining the U.S. film industry as we know it. Disney buying Fox and dismantling it, so that in a while people won’t even remember it existed. Disney has a become such a colossus that it’s even alarming due to its size and its ability to shape the future. Paramount just distributing movies made by other outfits. There is also some uncertainty about Sony and Lionsgate is now on the verge of a sale. [But] fortunately Warner Bros. is holding up.

“The landscape is changing so rapidly that it’s normal for this to impact product [output]. There were definitely less quality [U.S.] titles on offer this year, even though we have no shortage of good movies.”
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“All those scenes of characters driving in Los Angeles were gorgeous — I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. And the Manson girls floating in and out gave just enough of an edge to the proceedings. But judging from the audience reaction in my theater, the crowd didn’t fully embrace the film until the Krakatoa of blood at the end, which was the moment when I lost all sense of engagement.” — HE commenter “Gatsby1040” in yesterday’s OUATIH thread (“Tarantino Spoiler Policy“).

I suspect that ticket buyers everywhere are reacting to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood as I did in Cannes, experiencing a kind of mild, in-and-out, comme ci comme ca satisfaction but not really feeling the heavy current until the finale. What is everyone else detecting? What did the various rooms feel like as people were leaving the theatre?

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is sensing that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is going to earn more than Sony’s projected weekend figure of $30 million. $34 to $39 million, for sure, but possibly as high as the 40s and even the low 50s.

My sense is that OUATIH will develop legs among the 40-plus set. I think it’ll hang in there and become a slow-and-steady earner. It’s not really a film for compulsively texting Millennials and GenZ.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit is reporting that the film needs to earn $375 million worldwide to break even.

Mendelson: “Sure, it’s not as aggressively crowd-pleasing as Django Unchained or Inglorious Basterds, but I think most people walking into a Tarantino movie in 2019 have some idea of what they are in for. The reviews are as positive as you’d expect, and (no spoilers) word will eventually filter out that the movie doesn’t necessarily do all of the things that you [might] be afraid that a Tarantino movie tangentially about the Manson murders might do. Again, no details, but I will argue that the violence is significantly closer in onscreen content to Pulp Fiction than The Hateful Eight.”

As many of us heard last April, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut is (a) a 4K visual upgrade that’s said to be the best-looking version ever and (b) a 182-minute version that’s shorter than Apocalypse Now Redux by 20 minutes. Two hours from now I’ll be seeing it on a huge IMAX screen. I’ll probably never see this 1979 classic ever again under such optimum conditions. As Peter Ustinov‘s Lentulus Batiatus would say, “I tingle.”

From “Witness to Apocalypse Now: Final Cut,” posted on 4.28.19:

In a perfect world, I would be James Mason and Martin Landau would be the Woke McCarthyites, and the Movie Godz would smile down and approve. But we don’t live in such a realm. In reality I am a blend of Kevin McCarthy‘s character at the ending of Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers plus Veronica Cartwright‘s character when she comes up to Donald Sutherland at the end of Phil Kaufman’s 1978 version.