TYT‘s Cenk Uygur: “The heart of Hillary Clinton‘s problem and why she would ever lose to an idiot monster like Donald Trump, is because she ran on ‘no change’. People didn’t like that message. Mainstream media never tells you that and plus, they’re part of the status quo, they love the status quo and they don’t want you thinking that people want to change the status quo. What is the essence of Joe Biden’s campaign? [Other than the replacing of Trump], ‘no change.’ In fact, [Biden] literally went to a bunch of wealthy donors last week and said, ‘Nothing will fundamentally change…I promise you.’ So if you’re gonna run on that message, of course Trump would like to run against you. Because that’s exactly what he ran against last time, and why he won.”

The legendary distributor, exhibitor and producer Ben Barenholtz passed earlier today in Prague, at age 83. A Manhattanite for many decades, Barenholtz moved to Prague last year and into “an apartment over a legit theater in a cool, low-key neighborhood,” according to a New York-based distributor I spoke to this morning.

Remember that Humphrey Bogart line in Casablanca when Ingrid Bergman laments the possibility that Victor Laszlo “might die in Casablanca”, and Bogart says, “What of it? I’m gonna die in Casablanca — it’s a good spot for it.” Prague isn’t a bad place to depart from either. The vibe is very special there, I’ve always felt.

Two years ago Barenholtz completed his first directorial effort, Alina, which played at the Metrograph but apparently isn’t streaming anywhere. (I’m suddenly seized by an urge see it.) Here’s a good Barenholz profile that ran in the N.Y. Times a couple of summers ago, written by John Anderson.

Ben’s Wikipage says he was “developing a sequel to Alina as well as working on an autobiographical film, Aaron.”

Barenholtz was one of the original innovative cool cats of the 20th Century Manhattan indie exhibition and distribution scene. He was also a genuine human being. I used to run into him at Manhattan parties in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and over the years I knew a lot of guys (Sam Kitt, Joel and Ethan Cohen) who had worked with him in some capacity. He always wore that slightly bemused grin.

As an exhibitor, Barenholtz was known for innovative promotion and screening of cool films (Village Theatre, Elgin Cinema) and as a distributor for having discovered and nurtured the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, John Sayles and Guy Maddin. And for Libra Films (Cousin Cousine, Eraserhead, Return of the Secaucus 7), his distribution company that he launched in 1972 and ran until the early ’80s, and then Circle Films (Blood Simple, John Woo‘s The Killer), which was a going concern until the early ’90s.

This political cartoon, posted yesterday by Michael de Adder, is an instant stone classic. On Facebook Rod Lurie asked if it was “fair”. Political cartoons are rarely “fair”, but the best (like this one) convey core truths — i.e., how things actually are or what we believe them to be. We all understand that Trump’s southern-border immigration policy is to keep out or otherwise strongly discourage, partly through the imposing of harsh and heartless measures upon children of would-be immigrants. There’s no ambiguity about that. De Adder’s illustration doesn’t lie.

Boilerplate: “Like many, Canadian artist Michael de Adder was saddened and appalled by the images of El Salvadoran migrants Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, drowned on the bank of the Rio Grande river. So de Adder created a political cartoon to capture the way he felt about the tragedy and the reaction from President Donald Trump and his administration to the plight of migrants seeking a better life.

“Martínez arrived along with his wife, daughter and a brother at a migrant camp, hoping for an appointment to petition for political asylum in the United States. The family spent two months waiting in temperatures that reached 113 degrees before they decided to try to cross the border. They first tried to enter at the international bridge, but were told the office was closed and to come back another day so they turned to the river.

“Martínez and his daughter made it to the Texas side of the border, but when he returned to the river to help his wife cross, the little girl jumped into the water after her father. The current overwhelmed the two and they drowned clinging to each other while Martínez’s wife and Angie mother watched, unable to help.”

150 film critics have named Jordan Peele‘s Us as the Best Movie of 2019 thus far. Sure it is! Peele’s film was actually fairly decent as far as it went, but I found it…well, certainly ballsy. Imagine the cojones it took for Peele to decide upon Ken Kragen’s “Hands Across America” campaign as the film’s ultimate evildoer or baddy-waddy.

In all seriousness, Us earned a Metacritic score of 81 and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 94 and an audience rating of 63. So why did Ruimy’s Raiders call it the best of the year so far? I have my suspicions ** — what are yours? Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf compared Us to John Carpenter‘s The Fog (’80), the somewhat disappointing follow-up to the hugely successful Halloween. That’s about right.

The next most popular nine among the 150 are (in this order) The Souvenir, Booksmart, Long Day’s Journey Into Night 3D, High Life, Transit, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Apollo 11, Ash is Purest White and Avengers: Endgame.

Here, again, is Hollywood Elsewhere’s 12 best of the year so far:

1. Kent Jones‘ Diane / “All Hail Diane — 2019’s Best Film So Far“, filed on 3.27.19.

2. Craig Zahler‘s Dragged Across Concrete / “All Hail Dragged Across Concrete,” filed on 3.21.19.

3. FX’s Fosse/Verdon / “Fosse/Verdon — Theatrical, Exquisite, Pizazzy, Deep Blue,” filed on 4.25.19.

4. A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name / “Crosby Doc Hurts Real Good,” filed on 1.27.19.

5. Russo Brothers‘ Avengers: Endgame / “Okay With Nominating Endgame For Best Picture Oscar,” filed on 5.4.19.

Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis‘ Yesterday hasn’t won overwhelming critical support, but apparently it’s going to sell a lot of tickets. I’m not saying it’s going to match Bohemian Rhapsody numbers, but a similar dichotomy has kicked in — mezzo-mezzo reactions on RT and Metacritic but hugely popular with Average Joes. Moderators of two film clubs or classes (one in Los Angeles, another in Westchester County) said the same things.

L.A guy: “Yesterday played way through the roof with my crowd (biggest of the season), really one of the most enthusiastic responses I’ve ever had. You could really see this crowd, perfect age for Beatle memories, dig this in a very big way.”

Westchester guy: “Not only did the screening sell out but the audience was probably half kids, from about ten into their teens. Most there with their parents. This sold out strictly on word-of-mouth and an email blast to the membership — in other words, a lot of people have seen this trailer and apparently want to see this movie. It was a big, big hit with the audience. A lot of people last night walked out smiling, wiping away tears.”

Yesterday I was once again admonished for not lining up behind Uncle Joe. The only thing that stories like Michelle Goldberg‘s “Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person” can do is “weaken the Democrats’ potential win,” I was told. People like Michelle and myself “are out of touch with the party’s base” — i.e., your white-haired, pudge-bod, Croc-wearing rank-and-file voters who are “the meat and potatoes of the party. They decide. You do not. Look at Bernie — no superdelegates and he still can’t poll higher than Biden. What does that TELL YOU? There is an end game possibility here that it’s going to be Biden. So suck it up, man.”

HE Reply to Admonisher: “Primaries are warm-ups for the general election. There’s nothing especially cruel or out of bounds about ‘Typewriter Joe’ being jabbed or hammered by Democratic rivals for being too doddering or out of synch with the times. However crude or overly disparaging these criticisms may seem to you, they’re fair. Because Biden IS Typewriter Joe — a moderately palatable option, a decent fellow as far as it goes, and obviously preferable to Trump, but a good 15 years past his sell-by date and not a terrific idea for obvious reasons. If it comes down to Joe vs. Trump, I’ll suck it up, hold my nose and vote for the former. But if the Democratic nominee has to be 60-plus, it should be Elizabeth Warren. Bernie’s time has come and gone.

Yesterday’s news about legendary producer Joel Silver, 66, leaving Silver Pictures didn’t seem to add up.

A onetime protege and producing partner of Larry Gordon, Silver launched the company in ’80, built it into a strong and successful action-flick shop, co-pioneered the whammy-chart approach to action films, earned hundreds of millions for Warner Bros. (the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Matrix franchises, Predator, The Last Boy Scout, Assassins, Swordfish, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, V for Vendetta, The Nice Guys). Things began to wind down when Silver’s longstanding partnership with Warner Bros. ended, and then a subsequent Universal deal didn’t pan out. Silver then partnered with Canadian private equity financier Daryl Katz.

But how does a guy who blazed his own high-powered trail and created his own self-named fiefdom…how and why does the commandant of Silver Pictures wind up leaving Silver Pictures?

According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, the big-spending Silver (owner and renovator of Auldbrass, a South Carolina plantation estate built by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as a former owner of the Wright-designed Storer House as well as a Wright-designed 1941 Lincoln Continental) more or less torpedoed himself by blowing too much dough while failing to produce enough hit films.

“It is unclear whether Silver was fired or left on his own accord,” Kit reports.

“Silver rose to prominence in the era of the non-writing movie producer, a time when he and peers like Jerry Bruckheimer could command $2.5 million plus a cut of first-dollar gross on a studio film. Warner Bros. was a home to him, advancing him money when he needed it and assigning him big-budget features to develop and produce. As he rose in prominence, Silver purchased homes in Brentwood, Malibu and South Carolina, as well as an art collection he once valued at $17 million, courtside Lakers seats and the architecturally significant Venice Post Office property near the ocean in Venice Beach.”

I was chummy with Silver for a couple of years in the early ’90s — late ’92 through ’94. Then relations chilled. Too complex to recite here. Silver has a legendary temper. He was the real-life model for Saul Rubinek‘s Lee Donowitz character in True Romance. It’s also been said that Silver was a partial model for Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.

Posted on 4.26.07: “The late Dan Cracchiolo, the hot shot get-around who worked as Joel Silver‘s top guy in the mid to late ’90s and a little beyond, once told me about a conversation he and Silver had about the size of the craniums of big movie stars. He said that Silver told him, ‘Dan, all big stars have really big heads.’ Physically, he meant.”

16 years after the ghastly heat wave of 2003, Europe is about to become a sweatbox again. The boys were with me during that sweltering summer. Jett had just turned 15; Dylan was 13 and 1/2. We got through it, but barely. A couple of days before the heat began, I slipped into a Castorama near Place de Clichy and bought three sizable fans. They restored our souls. If I hadn’t pounced when I did the fans might’ve been sold out.

To escape the damp, jungle-like Paris air we decided to attend 2013 Locarno Film Festival. It began on Wednesday, 8.7.03, and closed ten days later. A smart, elegant, sophisticated gathering. Locarno is in southern Switzerland, of course, but it’s northern Italy in almost every tangible sense — culturally, atmospherically, architecturally. The gelato stands were a daily blessing.

I remember Roger Ebert‘s face being all pink and sweat-beady during an outdoor discussion panel. The guys and I were constantly soaked, of course. Every afternoon around 3 or 4 we took an hour-long dip in Lake Maggiore.

“I can say with utter confidence, however, that we’re here, we’re credentialed, and we’re rockin’ and sockin’,” I wrote in an 8.5.03 filing. “That last verb referred to the fact that the dirty socks and T-shirts are boiling in a big pot of water on the stove. Not the best way to clean clothes, but we were on a budget. If you stir the clothes around in the steaming water and then cool them off and wring them out and then sun-dry them on the sundeck, they’ll at least “feel” cleaner when you put them on later.

We arrived after an all-night train ride from Paris in a second-class compartment — six bunks in a space the size of a large foot locker. Locarno was scenically beautiful, the pizzas tasted better than in Paris, black and yellow leopard-skin motifs were printed on every exploitable object and surface (that breed of cat being the festival’s theme) and the festival looked, smelled and talked like a class act.

The kids and I were having breakfast Thursday morning on the outdoor terrace at the Hotel Arcadia, where most of the journalist freeloaders were staying, when film critic and scholar Harlan Jacobson walked over and said hello. ‘Welcome to Switzerland, guys,’ he said to Jett and Dylan. ‘It’s a wild place. Drugs and girls are very plentiful here so you’ll have a good time.’ Harlan was drolly alluding to Switzerland’s reputation as the world capital of complacency, order and tidy-ness.

A guy was openly smoking weed later that night while sitting in the middle of a big crowd watching an open-air screening of Vincente Minelli‘s The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant…stoned.

We all know what a 65% Rotten Tomatoes rating means. It means that the film in question has problems. It means that if Yesterday was a kid in science class who’s just taken a pop quiz, he’d be looking at a failing grade. Not horribly failing but a notch or two below the minimum passing grade of 70.

Regional film critic friend: “Yesterday is more of a Richard Curtis than a Danny Boyle thing. The premise is so offbeat that it actually works. The totally arbitrary nature of other things that don’t exist in human memory after a worldwide blackout — Coke, cigarettes, Harry Potter — is kind of fun.

“Himesh Patel is a very sympathetic lead, and Lily James is a real cutie. Patel’s singing isn’t great, but good enough for the purposes of the film.

“The first hour is a lot of fun but Yesterday sags in the middle, and you get the feeling that screenwriter Richard Curtis has boxed himself into a corner with his premise. The ending is a typical feel-good Curtis production, which will probably turn a certain amount of people off, and the (spoiler here) confessional scene in front of a Wembley audience is one of those ‘no one would ever in a million years do this in front of a group of total strangers’ kind of sequence that is used all too often in films these days.

“Yesterday is finally a reminder, as if we needed to be reminded, of how truly great the Beatles catalogue is.”

Friend who moderates a film series for 40-plus types: “I held a preview screening of Yesterday last night at the usual venue. Not only did it sell out — but the audience was probably half-kids, from about 10 into their teens. Most there with their parents. This sold out strictly on word-of-mouth and an email blast to the membership — in other words, a lot of people have seen this trailer and apparently want to see this movie.

“As an unabashed Richard Curtis fan, I was disappointed in this movie when I went to a press screening a couple of weeks ago. I felt the film had serious third-act problems, that he didn’t know how to finish it. I also felt he seriously underwrote Kate McKinnon‘s role, as well as the role of the sidekick/roadie. The latter should have had the inspiredly random humor of the Rhys Ifans character in Notting Hill but doesn’t.

“Watching it again last night, the latter two criticisms still held — but they didn’t bother as much. And the rest of it played really well for me. Better yet, it was a big, big hit with the audience, which ranged in age from 10 to 80. And there’s that surprising scene near the end that, at a minimum, will take your breath away and bring a lump to your throat. A lot of people last night walked out smiling, while wiping away tears.

“Plus, as noted, the music, which remains incredibly vital. This, the Crosby doc and Rolling Thunder make this a boomer’s musical wet dream of a summer.”

According to recent (6.21 through 6.24) Emerson Polling national survey, Mayor Pete beats Donald Trump by 52% to 48% — margin of error 2.9% plus or minus,

At a recent Planned Parenthood convention in South Carolina, “several groups of chanting supporters marched their candidates into the auditorium. On Saturday morning, Kamala Harris came down an escalator accompanied by a cheering throng and a high school drum line. Later, boisterous backers of Cory Booker streamed in behind him from one end of the convention center, only to meet dozens of raucous Beto O’Rourke fans coming from the other. They came together in the middle, attempting to drown each other out with chants like rival gangs in a good-natured musical.

“Shortly after that, a group of Joe Biden supporters gathered to march into the main hall. Biden wasn’t with them, but they planned to enter as he appeared onstage. There were 20 or 30 people, a smaller group than those accompanying Harris, Booker or O’Rourke, and despite a few earnest woo-hoos, they weren’t nearly as loud as the others.

“An ability to draw crowds isn’t everything — a tepid vote counts the same as a passionate one. Biden’s supporters are older than those of other Democrats, which gives his campaign less visible energy but a more reliable voting base. Still, as recent elections have shown, enthusiasm matters. Anyone convinced that Biden is the safe choice should go see him for themselves.” — from Michelle Goldberg‘s “Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person,” posted on 6.24.19.

…the industry takes note. But this sounds a bit curious. Everything I’ve heard and read about James Gray‘s Ad Astra (Disney/Fox, 9.20), a father-son, space-travel, Heart of Darkness-like drama with Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, has indicated it’s a hard-luck project. Gray wanted it to go to Cannes, but the FX couldn’t be finished in time. The release date was bumped twice (slated for 1.11.19 and then 5.24.19). Remember that for a film of this scope (space adventure, other realms and universes, etc.), $50 million is a nickle-and-dime budget. So what is it that Tapley has heard about Ad Astra? Specifically, I mean. What’s special about it, what stands out? It’s not enough to say “whoa, I’m very excited!” If you’ve heard something solid, great — pass it along. If you haven’t heard any specifics or don’t want to share them, stand down.