Beto O’Rourke, who obviously needs to take straight-shooter lessons from Pete Buttigieg, has clearly calculated that “America does not want another player in the outrage industrial complex. And he knows that for a Democrat to beat Donald Trump, he/she has to basically be nice, normal and not weird. And that’s what he’s trying to do.

“The problem is that he has to backpedal all the time…he’s had to apologize. He says ‘yeah, I’m out of town a lot and my wife has to take care of the kids when I’m gone’ — a pretty normal joke. But then he has to apologize, which I think is a mistake. I actually believe that the brand of being normal and nice…to not fire people up so they hate others and treat them with contempt..can really work. Now, [obviously] he’s got to have some more substance going forward, and we’ll see.” — Arthur Brooks, columnist, The Washington Post.

Now that Triple Frontier is on Netflix, could the HE commentariat please kick it around?

I gave it a pass because of how it plays out during the second half. Here’s how I put it a few days ago. Key passage: “Does Triple Frontier stand up to the famous Howard Hawks standard — ‘three great scenes and no bad ones’? Perhaps not, but it has at least two great scenes (the chopper crash and the donkey), and that’s something.”

HE regards Peter Hyams as an absolute dog of a director. I’ve hated every fibre of his “creative” being for as long as I can remember. The Movie Godz will never forgive him for the 1984 abomination that was 2010…never.

Two of the finest bare-bones, no-bullshit violent noirs ever made, John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67) and John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), will play at the New Beverly on Wednesday, 3.27 and Thursday, 3.28. When I’ll be out of town…perfect!

I’ve seen Point Blank at least a dozen times and I own the Bluray, of course, but a friend is saying “oh, no…it’s a much bigger deal to see it projected with a mint-condition 35mm celluloid print.” Plus there’s no Bluray or HD streaming version of The Outfit so catching a decent print of it will be something.

But of course, there’s no depending on the New Beverly in this regard, as every so often they’ll show faded “pink” prints of this or that ’60s or ’70s film. The Aero (which has recently been favoring DCPs over prints) has done this also from time to time. I certainly don’t trust the New Bev to screen only non-faded prints — does anyone? I wish it were otherwise.

If I wasn’t going to be back east I would probably risk it and attend out of love for these films, but you can’t trust celluloid prints of 50-year-old films to look mint. The format is inherently untrustworthy in this day and age.

HE to Eric Kohn: “You said on your most recent Indiewire podcast that Booksmart (UA Releasing, 5.24) is Oscar-worthy. I thought it was supposed to be the new Superbad…fine. I can’t wait to see it. But why bring Oscars into it?” Kohn to HE: “The enthusiasm for Beanie Feldstein could very well have legs. People are gonna come out of this film and say ‘she’s really arrived.'” HE to Kohn: “Oh, I see…Beanie’s cool. She punched through in Lady Bird.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: “I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.”

“Beto got in the race. Beto O’Rourke from Texas. He was pretty popular a while ago. But now he’s being greeted with ‘huhn, a white guy?’ Suddenly the ‘I don’t see color’ people, see color. You know…white, black, who cares? Let’s stop orange.”

Anyone who can easily slip into dreamland gets my vote. Like my son Jett. When he was only two or three weeks old, I fell extra-double in love with the guy when he began to forsake the usual 3 am wake-ups and sleep all through the night (i.e., midnight to 6 am). No-sweat slumberers also tend to be deep sleepers, I’ve found. And nicer people.

Light sleepers doze on the surface of the pond, and wake at the slightest disturbance. I always sleep at the very bottom, on the sand and silt. Insomniacs, I’m sorry to say, can be unpleasant at times — depressive, resentful, prickly. Remember Al Pacino‘s Will Dormir in Insomnia? Talk about an anxious, miserable mope. His best moment came at the finale, after Robin Williams had fatally shot him — “I need sleep.”

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Hollywood Elsewhere hereby nominates John Huston‘s Escape to Victory (’81) as perhaps the dumbest, phoniest, most jingoistic, credibility-straining and most audience-despising POW film ever made.

The bullshit story attempts to blend The Great Escape with a rousing tale about a big soccer match between a German team and Allied prisoners of war and blah blah. Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow, Pelé and Daniel Massey costarred.

The climatic game happens in Paris (le Stade Olympique Yves-du-Manoir) with a huge crowd cheering the Allies and yelling “victoire!” Not only do the allies win it, but they escape through a tunnel after doing so.

I caught a press screening at the Ziegfeld in July of ’81, and I distinctly remember staggering out of the theatre and groaning and tearing it to shreds in giddy chats with journo pals.

Everyone uses hand gestures while speaking in front of a group or crowd. It’s just a matter of using the right ones. Just make sure your palms are always facing up. Keep them open and unclenched, like you’ve nothing to hide. And don’t slash the air with your hands — just pretend you’re one-handedly dealing cards with your right (or left) hand. If you want to emphasize a point you’ve just made, “deal a card”. Another point, another card — simple. Every so often you can do a JFK finger-point gesture, but the main thing is to keep it simple and don’t over-gesture. Anyone who knows anything about public speaking will say the same thing. Make sure that your palms are facing the ceiling or the sky.

35 years ago Taylor Hackford‘s remake of Jacques Tourneur‘s Out of the Past was retitled Against All Odds — a classic Hollywood dumb-down move. The thinking was “why confuse audiences with a spooky-sounding title about dark, enveloping fate when you can sell an alternate that might refer to a tough football game or some kind of mission impossible?”

Yesterday David Chase‘s Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, was retitled as just plain, dumb-as-a-rock, stick-your-thumb-up-your-ass Newark.

What was so bad about the Many Saints title? It had a ring. Newark sounds like it’s another Detroit, right?

The Warner Bros. execs behind the title change probably tested The Many Saints of Newark with a focus group, and the group probably expressed confusion or irritation. “What kind of saints?” “I don’t get it.” “Is this about a football team?” “Whoever heard of saints residing in Newark?”

Let’s revise some titles of some famous Sopranos episodes with the same reductionist approach. I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano is now Jeannie. The Knight in White Satin Armor is now called Armor. Pine Barrens will henceforth be known as Fucking Freezin’ Out Here. Long Term Parking will hereafter be called She Dies.

I don’t give a single infinitesimal fuck about James Gunn having been re-hired to direct Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. Because I was down with the original Guardians but hated the second one so I figured the third would be worse. But the willingness of Disney’s Alan Horn to reverse course about a Twitter-related nervous nelly firing is somewhat encouraging.

Posted today by The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield: “I want to pause long enough to congratulate Hollywood on making it to the Belated Backdoor [of the] Who The Hell Knows What the Rules Are? era of corporate decision-making under the Social Media Backlash Sun

“That’s a step forward from the Kneejerk Duck, Cover and Throw Everyone Under the Bus era that we’ve been living through.

“But what does this experience say for the future? Sometime next week, when some other Disney employee has their ancient words ‘surfaced’ [on Twitter], is Disney now making a statement that they aren’t going to be pushed around by the social media mobs, but they’ll take their time and give things a little thought before they drop an employee over a cliff?

“Or are they saying ‘yes, if the mobs get loud enough we may have to throw you overboard. However, if somewhere down the line you can get the mobs to quiet down or get distracted, we might be able to give it another try’?”