Wall Street Journal reporter Reid Epstein has tweeted that Joe Biden has described Mike Pence as “a decent guy, our vice president.”

That’s it! Biden is done, finito, over and out. In this highly charged, intensely contrarian atmosphere, a possible Democratic presidential candidate cannot be exuding collegial, business-as-usual, hail-fellow-well-met vibes about a culturally ass-backwards, white-haired rightwing fiend who’s stood foursquare behind our mafia-crime-boss President, and who once ratted out his fraternity brothers for having a beer keg.

There’s no room for that kind of casually jocular, country-club, “Mike has his flaws but he’s an okay guy” attitude. Forget it!

On top of which Epstein and Janet Hook have filed a WSJ piece about how Democratic leaders in Iowa “are hungry for a young standard-bearer who will usher in generational change,” which is basically a “not now, too late, you’ve missed your chance” message aimed at Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The Pence quote plus that 1.23 N.Y. Times story about Biden accepting a $200K speaking fee from the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan weeks before the November 2018 election, and during his speech supporting Representative Fred Upton, a long-serving Republican ‘who in 2017 helped craft a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act'”…that’s it.

Biden is toast — he will not make it through the Democratic primary process.

The likeliest Democratic nominees are now Beto O’Rourke (who will be announcing within a few days) or Kamala Harris, and at the end of the day O’Rourke will probably be the victor.

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If someone were to remake Elmer Gantry with, say, Leonardo DiCaprio or Matthew McConaughey or Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, they definitely wouldn’t re-shoot this scene. Because if they did, the Stalinist wokesters would tear them apart on Twitter for daring to patronize African-American churchgoers of the ’20s, and in fact for projecting a borderline racist characterization.

Justin Chang and Guy Lodge would sputter and howl and lead the charge. They and their brethren would accuse the filmmakers of trying to make white audiences feel good about themselves, of trying to ignite fantasies about how soulful and open-hearted whites imagine themselves to be in the gentlest of spiritual circumstances.

In the original Elmer Gantry (’60) this scene was one of Burt Lancaster‘s all-time finest — a charismatic movie-star scene — and one reason why he won the Best Actor Oscar that year. But God help any actor or filmmaker today who would be stupid enough to imagine that an evil white person could step into a black church and just blend right in, etc. Only a white supremacist at heart could imagine such a scenario.

Conductor, composer and pianist Andre Previn has left the earth at age 89. To this day I’m unfamiliar with 90% of what Previn composed or conducted. To me he was the movie-score guy — Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Elmer Gantry, One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce, My Fair Lady, etc. Previn was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won four.

Previn wrote a brief memoir of his early years in Hollywood, “No Minor Chords“, published in ’91 and edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Previn’s life famously took a soap-opera turn in the late ’60s when he and then-wife Dory invited Mia Farrow into their lives. An affair between Previn and Farrow resulted and the marriage ended. Dory later launched a career as a performer with “Beware of Young Girls,” her song widely perceived to be aimed at Farrow.

In “No Minor Chords”, Previn recounted a near-dalliance with Ava Gardner in the mid 1940s.

“She listened to me play, quite attentively,” Previn wrote, “and then asked an incredible question: ‘Would you like to take me home later?’ Well, I was 17 and I simply could not allow myself to put a subtext connotation to this, so I asked: ‘You mean you don’t have a ride home?’ Ava gave me a long, searching look, saw that I was serious, excused herself and got up from the piano bench.”

I blew a couple of such opportunities myself in my late teens. I was too dumb or timid to simply realize what had been offered. I’ll never forgive myself…never.

If Don Vito Corleone was reckless or stupid, he would have spoken explicitly to his underlings about what he wanted done. But he didn’t need to. All he had to do was raise an eyebrow, give a look to Tom Hagen, imply what he was thinking.

And so he didn’t say “tell Clemenza to have his men beat the living shit out of these animals. Don’t kill them but definitely spill their blood, break their bones, make them weep with pain. But don’t kill them — that wouldn’t be justice.” Instead he said, “Give this to, uh, Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren’t going to be carried away. After all, we’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.”

By any measure J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, Margin Call) is a major-league director. By any reasonable standard Triple Frontier (Netflix, 3.6), which Chandor directed and co-wrote with Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker), looks like an above-average commando thriller. The four stars (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund) are grade-A-ish or in that general realm. So it’s not just some run-of-the-mill Netflix programmer. It has a serious vibe.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been saying that I want to catch a theatrical press screening, as an action film of this apparent calibre needs size and aural power to fully work, and because Roman Vasyanov‘s lensing looks handsome as hell. And with the limited theatrical debut only six days away (the Netflix streaming begins on 3.13) it’s been hard as hell to find an L.A. press screening. And it’s not on the Netflix online press site.

A Manhattan theatrical premiere is scheduled for this Sunday, 3.3…finally! It will press-screen concurrently in Los Angeles — thanks!

In 2010 Tom Hanks signed to do an earlier version of Triple Frontier under director Kathryn Bigelow. Johnny Depp was also attached or at least interested. There was talk at the time of changing the title to Sleeping Dogs. In late ’12 it was reported that Bigelow and Boal had put the project aside. Hanks would have played Affleck’s role. Affleck looks fat, of course — his breasts are bigger than Lady Gaga‘s and he could play Harvey Weinstein if he were to add 25 or 30 pounds — but he’s still Affleck.

“We’re better than this. We really are. As a country we’re so much better than this. It sounds like you’re crying out, for a new normal…to get back to normal. To make sure that our democracy stays intact. I mean, come on now…according to the Washington Post our President has made over 8718 false or misleading statements, and you got caught up in it. You came, you had your head down…the picture that really pained me. You were leaving the courthouse and your daughter, I guess she had braces on. Man, that hurt me. And I can imagine how it must feel for you. And we have got to get back to normal.” — Rep. Elijah Cummings to Michael Cohen at the end of today’s testimony.

There’s a Luchino Visconti series underway at the American Cinematheque Egyptian, and one big Hollywood Elsewhere benefit is a chance to finally see the masterful Rocco and His Brothers (’60) — yes, for the very first time in my life. The big moment happens on Saturday, 3.2 at 7:30 pm. The film was 4K restored in 2015, partly with the collaboration of dp Giuseppe Rotunno. DCP, not film.

Costarring Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori (married to Girardot in ’62, played Greek thug in Z, died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 55), Katina Paxinou, Spiros Focás and Claudia Cardinale. An alleged masterpiece — we’ll see.

For the last five or six Cannes Film Festivals Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday and I have been sharing a charming, two-story, 19th Century apartment in the Old Town section, just a five-minute walk from the Palais. Two things are different this year. One, Ann won’t be attending and two, a new apartment (same building, just as old and homey, huge bedroom, adjacent living room and kitchen) is in play. 1800 euros for 12 or 13 days (a proportionate split depending on who gets the bedroom plus 60 euro cleaning fee). You are not going to find this much charm and value for this kind of money anywhere during the festival — trust me. Lemme know.

In the view of an anonymous industry pro who’s spoken to THR‘s Scott Feinberg, Glenn Close lost the Best Actress Oscar because the New Academy Kidz — the younger, not-as-hip-as-they-could-be multiculturals who began to be given Academy memberships in 2016 — didn’t give that much of a shit about her “six previous nominations and no win” narrative.

Quote: “As for Glenn Close, I don’t know what the hell happened. The Wife had a lot lower profile than Olivia Colman‘s. That may have just been the category where people wanted to give The Favourite something — plus, Olivia is fully deserving, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbled.

“Keep in mind, the 2,500 newer members are mostly younger and may not really appreciate Glenn as much as those of us who have been around. You can’t look at the Academy as one big homogeneous blob.”

A couple of weeks ago Film Twitter re-discovered that John Wayne was a sexist rightwing militaristic asshole, and that if he were to somehow reanimate and reappear in 2019 he would be immediately damned and shunned by wokesters. Indiewire would run a series of editorials against the Orange County beast, and Brie Larson would let him know what for!

My father always despised Wayne politically, and I never saw any reason to disagree. Especially for Wayne’s blind support of the Vietnam War. He was also a racist, which was unfortunately par for the course among guys of his ilk.

But Wayne was an old-fashioned, 20th Century rightie. A traditionalist, a man’s man, a soft-spoken gentleman, “nice to the ladies”, a chip off the old Patton block. Obviously a dinosaur in today’s terms but…

He certainly wasn’t cut from today’s lunatic-conservative cloth — anti-science, corporate-fellating, religiously mule-like, stinking with hypocrisy. Ask Peter Bogdanovich or James Caan — you could relax with Wayne. He joked and smiled a lot and generally behaved like a human being. Which is another way of saying he wasn’t (at least in personal face-time terms) an asshole.

I’ve been fuming all my life at the Martian-head rule that dominates each and every full-body statue in every corner of the world. A naturally proportioned full-body statue will create an impression, viewed from below, of the figure’s head being a tad too small. The solution has been an ironclad rule that statues must have disproportionately large heads. Every sculptor in the known world has over-submitted to this rule, and — this is the odd part — to the exact same degree. I’m talking 100% uniformity.

The bizarre result is that every full-body statue in the world, from Beijing to Bangor to Timbuktu **, seems to have a genetic commonality in the same way that people afflicted with Down’s Syndrome seem to have the same kind of slanted eyes and doughy bodies. Every statued figure in the world (including John Wayne on his horse at the corner of Wilshire and La Cienega) looks like a space alien with a strangely swollen cranium.

In short, the big (swollen) heads look much, much worse than the small (natural-sized) heads.

This has been driving me insane for years. I know this rule will hold throughout eternity because the standing-statue mafia is too dug in, and that no one will ever listen, and I’ll be alone with this for the rest of my life. But I’m right.

It almost seems like a deliberate provocation on the part of the powers that be. We’re going to put Martian-head statues in every city around the world, they almost seem to be saying, and we want to see how far we can push it. Or rather, we want to see if anyone will have the spirit to say anything about this, or if people will just accept it like they accept everything else.

I know that every time I come upon a standing statue (most often in Europe), I mutter a tiny little “fuck you” under my breath. It gets me every time. — posted on 3.28.09 under the title “Worldwide Aliens.”

** Yes, I’m aware that full-body statues and especially those on horseback were all created in the 20th and 19th centuries.