I didn’t know Natalie Morales all that well before seeing Stuber last week. The viewing didn’t exactly broaden my Morales vistas. She plays the bright, somewhat frustrated daughter of Dave Bautista‘s bruiser cop — pretty much a rote, thankless role in a crudely written, brutally violent action comedy.

But I did come to know Morales in the below IMDB-produced video, in which the former Grinder and Parks and Recreation costar talks with real feeling about her worship of Buster Keaton. I had the same reaction to her words that I’ve had whenever I’ve seen a gifted but unlucky actor, a veteran of almost nothing but underwhelming films and TV shows, shine in a brilliant Broadway play.

“Aaaah, so that‘s who Morales is!”, I muttered to myself. “She not only gets Keaton but thinks her contemporaries need to wake up and shake off their resistance to watching classic black-and-white films.”

Stuber is Collateral reimagined and downgraded by opportunistic vulgarians. I’m speaking of director Michael Dowse, screenwriter Tripper Clancy and producers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.

It contains a predictably amusing performance by Kumail Nanjiani as an overwhelmed, too-sensitive-for-his-own good Uber driver, but it’s basically Kumail transferring his wry stand-up schtick to an action realm. Bautista struck me as too thick and gorilla-like to occupy the classic Schwarzenegger realm. Otherwise the basic idea behind Stuber is to bash, bruise, bludgeon and brutalize while leaning heavily on the cops-vs.-drug-dealers handbook.

Stuber appropriates Collateral‘s story and theme — a wimpish cab driver grows into a man of some consequence through an experience with a lone-wolf client with a violent job — while turning the dial up to 11. Torrents of coarse dialogue, gratuitous face-poundings, cartoonishly over-the-top stunts.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge wrote that Stuber “embraces the real-world physics of gunplay, car crashes and hand-to-hand combat.” Bullshit! The Daffy Duck vs. Yosemite Sam world, he means.

The opening day of Todd Phillips‘ Joker is less than three months off. Specifically 11 and 1/2 weeks. All over the world. Hence the Empire cover.

Posted on 4.3.19: “A sensitive simpleton, raised by a none-too-bright mom, wants laughter, joy and rapture from life. Alas, he finds little or none. Attempts stand-up comedy…nope. Starts wearing clown makeup full-time. Beaten, pummelled and tormented by a cruel, perverse, judgmental world. Finally snaps, becomes a demonic, broken-hearted figure whose motto is “life isn’t a tragedy — it’s a comedy.”

“I can’t be the only one who’s had it with Warner Bros. opportunists constantly returning to the same old drafty barn to milk the same old cow.

“30 years ago everyone thought Jack Nicholson had knocked it out of the park with his giggling creepo. But along came Heath Ledger’s version in 2008…the best, the absolute summit, the most delicious and diseased. And then eight years passed and the Joker was back in the form of Jared Leto…c’mon! And now a fourth version is upon us, and I’m not even thinking about Ceasar Romero.

“The Joker script (co-written by Scott Silver and co-director Todd Phillips) is an origin story, but Joaquin Phoenix was 43 or 44 years old when they shot it last year, and with his constant cigarette-smoking Phoenix looks at least 49 or 50. Who ever heard of an origin story performed by a weathered, somewhat haggard middle-aged guy with an embalming-fluid complexion?

“It’s one thing to be a tormented Donnie Darko as a child, a teenager or even an early 20something, but a 40something who’s nudging the big five-oh? And how does a mopey loser who’s been putzing around for 45 years…how does this guy suddenly morph into a notoriously demonic crime king?”

Truer words have rarely been recently spoken. It’s right below in black-and-white, but here’s my favorite excerpt: “The thing that I hate right now is that [film] criticism isn’t about [film] criticism any more — it’s about ‘how woke is this thing?’ And ‘is this woke or not?’ is a weird way of judging art.” Hats off to Sasha Stone for saying this clearly and concisely. Needs to be repeated and repeated again. In the Hollywood indie Sundance realm the late 20teens are the early 1950s — no question about it.

“I’m behind the camera on the producing side and I enjoy that a lot. But I keep doing less and less. I really believe that overall it’s a younger man’s game—not that there aren’t substantial parts for older characters…I just feel, the game itself, it’ll move on naturally. There will be a natural selection to it all.” — Brad Pitt to GQ Australia‘s Jake Millar.

Niki Caro‘s Mulan is another live-action digital remake of another Disney animated hit (i.e., 1998’s Mulan). Right away I can sense the carefully poised, vaguely antiseptic, myth-making ethos. We know this will be another link of Disney sausage, and yet I adored Caro’s Whale Rider and greatly admired McFarland USA. Set in China during the Han dynasty, it’s about a young Chinese maiden (Liu Yifei) who disguises herself as a male warrior in order to save her father during a Hun invasion. Also starring Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Yoson An, Gong Li, Jason Scott Lee. Is this a Hollywood Elsewhere film? Of course not.

One of the ways that rock stars and movie stars reside in the same general orbit is that they have a solemn responsibility to not suddenly look “older” in any kind of “wait a minute, what happened?” head-turning way. It’s part of the basic contract. They can gradually and gracefully age but no sudden hair loss. That’s an easily maintainable thing. They have to do a better job of coping with the ravages of time than Average Joes, and that means no weird hair dyes or expanding neck wattles.

Mick Jagger has always understood this. Cary Grant set the standard 60 years ago when he played a Madison Avenue ad man at age 54 while looking 45 or even a tad younger. A year earlier Orson Welles defined the other side of the scale by playing Det. Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil when he was only 42 years old, and yet looking like a dessicated wreck of at least 60 if not 65 years. This, trust me, was one of the reasons that North by Northwest made five times more dough than Touch of Evil. You can argue and put me down, but people prefer examples of defying the inevitable rather than submitting to it.

Last night Svetlana Cvetko‘s Show Me What You Got won the Taormina Film Festival‘s Cariddi D’Oro Award for Best Film, which sounds like some kind of “whoa”-level, top-tier honor. The Italian name of the award is “Premio Cariddi d’Oro per il Miglior Film.”

The black-and-white, Jules et Jim-like, menage a trois relationship film costars Cristina Rambaldi, Mattia Minasi and Neyssan Falahi.

Directed and co-written (with producer David Scott Smith) by Cvetko, Show Me What You Got runs 100 minutes. It premiered at the respected, decades-old film festival last Tuesday. HE’s own Phillip Noyce (The Quiet American, Rabbit Proof Fence, Clear and Present Danger) is the exec producer.

(l.) Revealing Ukraine director Oliver Stone, (r.) Show Me What You Got director-cowriter Svetlana Cvetko during Saturday’s Taormina Film Festival award ceremony.

Oliver Stone‘s Revealing Ukraine, a doc about the history of Ukraine since the Soviet Union collapse, won the festival’s Grand Prix award.

Christina Rambaldi is a niece of the late Italian special-effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial).

It’s significant that I didn’t hear about Svet’s moment of triumph until 20 hours had passed (it’s now just after 8pm on Sunday) but we’ll let that go.

It’s also significant, I feel, that Minasi and Falahi are ginger-haired. You can say “and what of it?” and I would say “nothing — it’s just worth noting.” You could say “it’s in black and white so who the hell cares what color their hair is?” and I would say “none, nobody, it’s fine…congratulations to all ginger-haired romantic leads the world over!”

Honestly? If I had my druthers I would prefer romantic leads who look like…oh, the young Alain Delon, say, or the young William Holden. But that’s me. And who cares what I think about this topic? No one.

Not bad, guys. Good to hear it again live. Thumbs up and all that. But I prefer the 1965 version. Especially with headphones. Oh, and Keith looks different. Like a Notre Dame gargoyle.

Six and 1/2 years ago Jessica Pare was quite the Mad Men magnet. Over the last three seasons (#5, #6, #7) nearly everyone was focused on her Megan Draper character, particularly her gaining and declining relationship with Don Draper. I was just as fascinated as anyone. Pare was cool, fascinating, in the conversation…a vital element in the watch-and-wonder world of 2012 and beyond.

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If a movie really has that special punch and pizazz, most of us can remember certain portions and lines. I’ll bet I’ve memorized dialogue from a thousand movies, maybe two or three thousand. Name any memorable film from the 1930s to today and I’ll recite a line or two. If not I’ll at least describe a distinctive shot or two, or something about the cinematography or production design. Go ahead — name one. I’m a walking film library. I can do this all day long.

I’m mentioning this because it hit me this morning that I can’t remember a single line or moment from Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln. I remember that early, completely unbelievable scene in which Daniel Day Lewis chats with two black Union soldiers (Colman Domingo as Private Harold Green, David Oyelowo as Corporal Ira Clark) and two white ones, but I don’t recall a word of the dialogue. I recall Oyelowo reciting a portion of the Gettysburg Address from memory, but I mostly recall muttering “bullshit”.

I remember Janusz Kaminski‘s milky, shafts-of-light cinematography, but he always shoots in this fashion. I remember the tone of DDL’s performance (and that he won the Best Actor Oscar), but I don’t remember a single one of his lines….not one. I recall that it won an Oscar for Best Production Design, but I also recall being enraged by the use of filtered sunlight inside the U.S. Senate chamber, which of course has no windows.

I also recall that Lincoln doesn’t offer a single establishing shot of the White House or the U.S. Capitol (the huge dome of which had recently been completed in early 1863) in the entire film. No images of how the White House South Lawn or Pennsylvania Avenue or the Treasury building or the Potomac might have looked.

I recall it was almost entirely composed of medium shots of shadowy interiors, medium shots of shadowy interiors and, just to break up the monotony, medium shots of shadowy interiors.

I remember writing about the state of plumbing in the Lincoln White House of the 1860s, and an HE commenter making a joke about the nation’s 16th president “dropping a deuce” at some point in the second act.

If you can’t remember a single good scene or line, the movie probably wasn’t that good to begin with.

Final sentence of my 11.8.12 review: “The bottom line? Lincoln is a good film, deserving of respect and worth seeing, but it happens at an emotional distance and feels like an educational slog.”

Five years ago I repeated one of the most important rules for famous guys attending public events, which is to never wear orthopedic old-man shoes.

I was derided for saying this, of course, but you can’t explain this aesthetic to deplorable-shoe types. Either you get the importance of wearing elegant shoes in public or you don’t. Wear your grandpa shoes all you want when you’re at home or shuffling around the mall, but never in front of the paying public. The wearing of comfort shoes is a sign of frailty and the lack of a vibrant future.

Nancy Pelosi obviously understands this philosophy, this reality. During last week’s pride parade in San Francisco, the 80-year-old Speaker of the House wore purple Manolo heels. While marching in a parade! Nobody would’ve blinked or said a word if she’d worn sensible shoes or even hiking boots, but she toughed it out because she gets it. She understands what Bruce Dern, Robert De Niro and other guys of that age group refuse to acknowledge.

You know who also gets it? Martin Scorsese. Dude’s pushing 77 and he always wears Italian-style black leather lace-ups.

Physical media is living on borrowed time, of course, but how much longer discs will continue to be sold on Amazon and carried by Best Buy is anyone’s guess. I’ll always cherish the idea of owning choice Blurays and 4K UHD discs, but will I still be adding to the collection in 2030? Will everything be streaming in five years? Ten? Amazing that 40-something percent of the purchasing public is still buying DVDs.