Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation have produced a 4K digital restoration of John Ford’s The Searchers, and in the process created a new 70mm print.

The latter will be screened five days hence — Sunday, 4.21, 3:15 pm — at Hollywood’s Egyptian, as a closing-day presentation from the TCM Classic Film Festival. Alexander Payne will offer a few thoughts.

No screenings for NYC film cognoscenti? Nothing planned for MoMA or FSLC’s Walter Reade? Or at the Film Forum or at Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns? Odd.

There’s just one problem. The Searchers is rife with problematic depictions of Native Americans. Wokesters certainly won’t approve. Don’t even speculate what Lily Gladstone might say.

Last night I saw Luca Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes‘ Challengers (Amazon, 4.26), and as far as “tennis pros engaged in romantic triangle” flicks go it’s fairly out there, man.

Challengers hasn’t been written and shot in my preferred style (like King Richard, my all-time favorite tennis movie) but I respect and admire the fact that Guadagnino, the director, has made a jumpy, flourishy, time-skotching, impressionistic, mostly hetero but also vaguely homoerotic film that…what’s the term, broadens your horizons? Challenges you and wakes you up? Makes a dent in your psyche?

It doesn’t do the usual thing and certainly pushes a few boundaries, but I like that for the most part. I certainly prefer films that try different strategies over ones that adhere to predictable ones.

So, putting this carefully, I didn’t love everything about it (which puts me in a minority) but I loved the verve, the effort, the invention, the ballsiness. I was irked here and there but I certainly wasn’t bored. All in all the audacity and impulsiveness of Challengers makes it Guadagnino’s best film since Call Me By Your Name. Really.

One of the less predictable aspects…,okay, a vaguely annoying thing is the hopping-around timeline, which I lost patience with around the halfway mark.

Another unusual thing is that the three main characters — Zendaya‘s Tashi Duncan, Mike Faist‘s Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor‘s Patrick Zweig — aren’t especially charming or likable or even attractive. Not to me, at least.

Compelling or intriguing actors are supposed to turn you on or at least engage your interest or empathy. Or arouse your blood.

If you’re a straight male you should either want to be like a straight-male protagonist or two on the screen, and you should be thinking about possibly fucking the lead actress. I had no such thoughts during Challengers (sorry), but others may feel differently. It takes all sorts, etc.

The story is a little confusing but here goes: Duncan, a former tennis player sidelined by injury, is now coaching Donaldson, her husband of a few years and a hotshot tennis star who’s on some kind of losing streak. Duncan met Donaldson and Zweig 11 or 12 years earlier and was attracted to them both, which led to some heated hotel-room smooching all around. (No — the dudes didn’t fuck each other.) Duncan married Donaldson but now Zweig is back in the arena and looking to beat Donaldson in a big match, and so Duncan is looking to somehow influence Zweig’s attitude or psychology or something…shit, I’m losing the thread.

Zweig is a bad boy with an impulsive, unstructured approach to everything outside of tennis…a guy who likes to fuck for fucking’s sake and otherwise enjoys poking at situational hornet’s nests. I didn’t “like” Zweig but O’Connor, a sinewy, dark-haired sweat beast who played Prince Charles in The Crown, has something…he’s the best of the bunch.

Challengers also the sweatiest film I’ve seen ever. I felt dampened by Faist’s sweat droplets.

I can’t believe this is happening, but it is. Biden almost certainly isn’t going to be re–elected eight months hence, and I’m deeply sick of the denialists on this site saying “ohh, pooh-pooh to the polls…the election is several months off” and all that crap.

When The Beast is restored to power in November the HE denial brigade will have to either disappear or change their social media identities or move to Portugal or Vietnam. They’ll certainly have to wear sunglasses and fishing hats for the next 10 or 15 years. Because Trump’s victory will be largely their fault. Because they looked the other way or otherwise fiddled while Rome burned.

I’m not talking about the expected right vs. left dynamic…status-quo, social-justice liberals vs. fired-up MAGA wackos…half of the country is terrified of an authoritarian sociopath winning and the other half believes that purging wokester fanatics is more important than anything else…alas, weakened Democrat fervor will decide things. Centrist moderates staying home on election day out of a lack of enthusiasm for sending great-grandpa back to the Oval for another four years. People sitting on their hands.

2024 is not 2020…the terror of The Beast is right around the damn corner.

National Public Radio’s newly-installed honcho Katherine Maher, by any fair-minded standard a flared-nostril, POC-worshipping, white-male-hating woke storm trooper, has wasted no time in bull-whipping (and nearly terminating) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner for having written a sharply critical 4.9 Free Press article about how NPR went over the woke waterfall five or six years ago and thereby lost the trust of moderately liberal and centrist listeners.

Berliner surely understood that his Free Press article, however truthful and grounded, would be a bridge-burner and that the odds of keeping his NPR job wouldn’t be good.

Right now Berliner is only suspended but you know he’s going to be facing great difficulty in the weeks ahead.

I could never decide where to scatter Tony’s remains. (He passed in the fall of ‘09.) I still have no good ideas. So he resides inside a small wicker storage thing in my bedroom. It’s not grotesque — he’s just there. Inside a dark-blue imitation velvet pouch with a drawstring.

I made a choice during last year’s Cannes Film Festival to sidestep screenings of Wim Wenders‘ Perfect Days, which I re-titled in my head as Toilet-Cleaning Guy.

It’s not that I was afraid of the subject…okay, I was a little bit. I might be an outlier in this regard, but I’m terrified of medium close-ups of turd-clogged toilets.

The film, of course, is about the spiritual (musical, literary, emotional, cosmic) life of Kōji Yakusho‘s Hirayama, and not his day job. Naturally.

Elite critics have praised Wenders’ film from the get-go, and now it’s getting the royal Criterion treatment.

Last month Katherine Maher, 40, succeeded John Lansing as CEO and president of National Public Radio (NPR). In contrast to many NPR predecssors, Maher has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization. She is, however, an adamant wokester Millennial, or she was, at least, four years ago during the George Floyd riots.

I’m presuming that under Maher’s leadership NPR will not be reverting to that mellow, thoughtful, sensibly measured news-and-reporting outlet that many of us knew during the Obama years and before.

Like much of the liberal realm, NPR began turning into a woke-talking-points platform when Trump took power on 1.20.17, and then veered into hardcore Stalinist woke-ism when the George Floyd riots happened in May 2020.

I’m certain Ira Berliner is very sorry. Me too.

Adding insult to injury Maher is from HE’s home town of Wilton — went to Wilton High School, etc.

Maher (no relation to Bill) turns 41 on 4.18.24. She has an agreeably deep and somewhat raspy voice, and bears an obvious resemblance to Rachel McAdams.