Jonathan Levine, Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron‘s Long Shot is a bust. After costing “roughy $40 million to make and another $30 million to market,” according to the N.Y. Times‘ Brooks Barnes, it made a lousy $10 million last weekend (it’s currently at $12 million) and will almost certainly suffer a 40%-or-higher diminishment during the next round (5.10 to 5.12).

The odds of tripling that opening weekend tally by the end of the run are not high. Face it — the movie was intermittently funny at best (I found it flat-out unfunny), the premise was absurd or at least distasteful (the toad-gazelle pairing of Rogen and Theron) and Joe and Jane Popcorn said “nope.”

No, wait — that’s not why it died. The handicappers are claiming that Long Shot sank beneath the waves because the competition from Avengers: Endgame was too fierce. So HE’s above-mentioned issues were incidental to its failure? I doubt it but you tell me.

Theory #1: Rogen is only 37 but he looks 49, and I’m wondering if the guy he’s been playing in film after film for the last 12 years (or since Knocked up) is starting to wear thin among his followers. I personally love the guy when he’s spouting impudent, sharp-edged dialogue, but his Long Shot character was a 16 year-old. Theory #2: It’s Charlize Theron‘s fault! The public accepts/respects her as a dramatic actress who takes chances, but is wary of watching her in a romcom mode. Theory #3: The movie blew chunks and the word got around. Theory #4 (see below): It’s Jon Feltheimer‘s fault!

“At his rally tonight, Trump says the government is unable to violently attack immigrants, someone in the crowd shouted ‘Shoot them!’

“The crowd & Trump erupt in laughter & cheers. Trump says, ‘Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement.'” .twitter.com/SgQd2OH9ti

— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 9, 2019

Got up late, slow to start, interruptions aplenty. A high point was learning how to mirror iPhone content on the Sony HDR 4K 65-incher. Suddenly it was 4:30 pm and time to hit Runyon Canyon. I might be subconsciously downshifting with the big flight to Stockholm and then Nice only three days away (Saturday at 6 pm). Tomorrow’s another day.

5.9 Update: I can’t do this. Too many last-minute, 48-hours-and-counting errands and clean-ups to take care of. The clock always speeds up and actually oppresses when you’re about to leave on a longish journey.

Wednesday, 5.8: Tomorrow morning Hollywood Elsewhere will be attending what boils down to a Pete Buttigieg rally. It’s technically a “Yes on EE” rally but c’mon. It’ll happen at SEIU 99, 2724 West 8th Street in Los Angeles, at the corner of 8th and Hoover. (Four or five blocks southwest of MacArthur Park.) The event, which Mayor Eric Garcetti will also attend, begins at 10:30 am. I’ll need to jump on the Yamaha rumble-hog so I can arrive at 8 or 8:30 am. A big crowd is expected.

Legend has long had it that sometime in late ’65 the once-friendly Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs had a falling out. While riding around Manhattan in a long black limousine, Dylan, who was into his “uptown Bob” phase, played a new unrecorded song for Ochs (reportedly “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“) and the latter, who had gradually developed a view that Dylan’s post-1963 material was too vague and mercurial and not political enough, told Dylan he didn’t like it.

“Whaddaya mean you don’t like it?” Dylan asked. “It’s not that good,” Ochs replied. Dylan told Ochs to get out of the limo.

I haven’t listened to “Window” in ages, and it’s a lot better than I’d remembered. I’m not saying Dylan was justified in giving Ochs the boot, but I understand why he might have succumbed to an angry impulse. It’s a good song. Ochs was wrong.

Dylan will turn 78 later this month. I don’t like to say or even think stuff like this, but he’s a year and a half older than effing Joe Biden. Like DeNiro and Scorsese, I wish Dylan could somehow stop aging and be allowed to remain on the planet earth forever.

At 10:30 pm on Friday, 5.24, Sylvester Stallone will take the stage at the Grand Lumiere in Cannes with three motives in mind. One, to screen clips from Rambo V — Last Blood, which Lionsgate will open stateside on 9.20. Two, to be celebrated with a career-tribute montage and an SRO from those in attendance. And three, for a screening of a 4K restoration of Ted Kotcheff‘s First Blood (and not Rambo — First Blood as the Cannes press release states).

Rambo V — Last Blood was directed by Adrian Grunberg (Get The Gringo) and produced by Millennium Films (aka Alchemy)?

Rambo V synopsis: “In the fifth episode of franchise, when the daughter of one of his friends is kidnapped, Rambo, who has been working on a ranch, crosses the U.S.-Mexican border and quickly finds himself up against the full might of one of Mexico’s most violent cartels.”

The script is by Stallone and Matt Circulnick. The costars include Paz Vega, Adriana Barraza, Oscar Jaenada, Joaquin Cosio and Yvette Monreal.

For anyone with half a brain, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig‘s N.Y. Times report about Donald Trump’s massive losses between 1985 and 1994, as revealed by Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, totally pops the myth-bubble about Trump being a shrewd, swaggering, super-rich businessman.

Trump was in fact propped up all those years by his father, Fred Trump, and was subsequently propped up, most likely, by Eastern European or Russian interests at some point within the last 10 or 15 years.

Will the popping of this myth have any effect on the blind loyalties of Trump’s hinterland, red-state supporters? The basis of his legend, after all, is that he’s a powerful financial hotshot who knows the ins and outs of the system and how to finagle things, and now it’s clear he was never a winner and in fact was a clumsy, profligate loser through and through.

Will this make a difference in Bumblefuckland? Of course not. All they care about is Trump as a symbol of rich-white-guy power and the way things used to be when The Brady Bunch was a hit series. As long as he continues to push back against immigration and embraces the fossil fuel industry (and thereby helps to hasten the end of the natural world as mankind has known it for thousands of years), they’ll stand behind him.

The most entertaining portion of this Last Word discussion comes when Lawrence O’Donnell tells Craig that the IRS transcripts that she and Buettner drew upon to write the story “have to have leaked out of the IRS.” Craig says nothing, but her facial expression (a slight nod, a smile) is priceless.

There are three kinds of happiness, for the most part. I could crank myself up and say there are ten or fifteen kinds (and maybe there are), but let’s keep it simple.

The first kind of happiness is the mild, steady-as-she-goes, non-euphoric kind that’s based upon a general, good-enough satisfaction with the basics (fulfilling job, loyal friends, a more-or-less happy relationship with a significant other, financial security) and trusting that good things are in the offing. I’m basically talking about believing in your future — a belief that things are pretty good for the most part, and that you’re not looking at an ongoing or worsening tragedy (like having neurofibromatosis or incurable cancer or living under a hellish police state) and that some of the miles to go before you sleep will be interesting..

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Taken during one of our standard Santa Monica Canyon weekend hikes, which also included detours to Pacific Palisades and Brentwood.

I don’t have to explain where this was taken. The house number gives it away.

Last night Tatyana wanted to watch Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, which she’d never seen. I hadn’t seen it since the fall of ’13 so I half-watched it and half-wrote, and it somehow played a little better this time. Not that I found it problematic back then. I felt it was a reasonably good tragedy but saddled with a story that was too dependent on A Streetcar Named Desire.

Last night it somehow felt stronger, snappier. I can’t explain why. I was impatient with it six years ago; last night was a better ride.

Tatyana liked it a lot, but at the same time was strongly affected by the sad arc of Cate Blanchett‘s Ruth Madoff-like character. Jasmine is a delusional wife of a financial wheeler-dealer (played by Alec Baldwin) who’s suddenly broke and without a life after Baldwin is busted by the feds and then commits suicide in the slam.

I explained all the Streetcar parallels, but Tatyana hasn’t seen that 1951 film either, in part because it’s too old. She does, however, have a liking for young Marlon Brando.

It’s basically very, very tough to get Tatyana to watch anything. She only wants to watch “masterpieces,” she says. Only films on the level of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days or A Separation…that line of country. She won’t sully herself with the watching of anything less than top-of-the-mountain classics, and she doesn’t like films that she doesn’t relate to personally in some deep-down way. And she won’t watch genre films or guy films like Heat, The Outfit or The Candidate. And she hates crap. I invited her to join me at a Long Shot screening, but she sensed trouble and declined. And nothing scary or violent.

Tatyana basically watches what she watches because she wants to watch it, and that usually means films with some sort of emotional lift or real-life resonance. Or if she has a special liking for the actor or actress.

From “Joe Biden’s ‘Electability’ Argument Is How Democrats Lose Elections,” a 5.7 Vanity Fair piece by Peter Hamby:

“Since Vietnam, every time a Democrat has won the presidency, it’s because Democrats voted with their hearts in a primary and closed ranks around the candidate who inspired them, promising an obvious break from the past and an inspiring vision that blossomed in the general election. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton. Barack Obama. All were young outsiders who tethered their message to the culture of the time.

“When Democrats have picked nominees cautiously and strategically falling in line, the results have been devastating, as Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton made plain.

“It’s not a perfect rule: While Gore and Clinton didn’t quite electrify the country, they still won the popular vote. And George McGovern was a heart candidate who got slaughtered by Richard Nixon in 1972. But the McGovern wipeout is kind of what Biden and his loyalists are clinging to: the idea that this Trump moment, like the wrenching 60s, is so existential and high stakes that Democrats will overlook their usual instincts and do the sensible thing.

“Theatrical and Irish, Biden surely is hoping that he can be a vehicle for both passion and pragmatism. But if he wins the nomination next year, it will be because Democrats went with their heads, not their bleeding hearts.

Avatar, the last James Cameron film to hit screens, opened nine and a half years ago. Since that time Cameron has been working on making four Avatar sequels. That’s right — four of ’em. Not a sequel or a trilogy but a five-parter if you count the original. Basically a theatrical miniseries.

It was announced today that the release date of the fourth and final Avatar sequel (aka Avatar 5) has been bumped from 12.19.25 to 12.17.27, which is (a) eight and a half years from now and (b) 19 years after the release of the original. Given that Cameron began work on Avatar in early ’06, there will actually be a time span of 21 years between the start of it all and Avatar 5.

Has anyone in the history of motion pictures ever invested this many years in the multi-part fulfillment of a single franchise?

New Avatar sequel dates, as dictated by Disney: Avatar 2 — previously slated to open on 12/18/20, now opening on 12.17.21 or eleven months after the swearing-in of President Pete Buttigieg. Avatar 2 — previously dated on 12.17.21, now bumped to 12.22.23, by which time Buttigieg’s re-election campaign will be in the final stages of preparation. Avatar 4 — previously dated on 12.20.24, now set to open on 12.19.25 or nearly a full year into Buttigieg’s second term. And then the debut of the grand finale, Avatar 5, on 12.17.27.