Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27) screens tonight in Los Angeles for journo elites. (Reviews will pop tomorrow — Thursday, 7.12 at 2 pm Pacific.) The NYC and LA all-media screenings will happen on or about 7.23. You can’t trust the junket guys, but even if you dial down their praises by 30% or 40% it still sounds pretty good.

The branding has begun on Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (Focus Features, 12.5), even though it won’t open for another five and a half months. I’ve heard that the film offers a kind of Game of Thrones aesthetic — hard R, vivid sex scenes, bloody battle sequences, unflinching. I’ve also heard that that Saoirse Ronan, playing the title role, delivers big-time. A guy who’s seen it says she’s “incredible, one of her very best performances, a physically demanding role that she throws herself into, really gets to shine, a full range of emotions.”

Nine years ago Neil Blomkamp was regarded as a hot visionary helmer in the wake of District 9, which was universally admired. Five years ago he was regarded as a somewhat less vital but nonetheless credible visionary craftsman (i.e., Jim Cameron wannabe) in the wake of Elysium, which the fanboys were iffy on. In the wake of Chappie three years ago he was regarded as a visionary craftsman who’ve been given his shot and hadn’t quite nailed it (Jar-Jar Binks comparisons were heard) but was still in the game. But Blomkamp paired with yet another MGM Robocop remake? Forget it.

via GIPHY

“I went to sleep dreaming life was beauty — I woke up knowing life is duty.” — written by David Mamet for a Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.”

I heard this line once during the original broadcast of this episode on 1.13.87. The guy who said the line was Dennis Franz‘s Det. Sal Benedetto, and I’ve never forgotten it. 31 and 1/2 years ago. I was watching Steven Bochco‘s fabled series on a 21″ cable-connected color TV. I was living in a cool little pre-war studio on High Tower Drive, a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne, elevator-accessible Long Goodbye apartment. Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.

I was working for Cannon Films publicity at the time, writing press kits. My future wife Maggie and I had either just returned from Paris or were planning a trip there. We got married the following October, and Jett came along the following June. [Originally posted on 11.14.09.]

Two dramas about gay teenagers subjected to the ravages of conversion therapy will open soon. The presumed award-season contender is Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased (Focus Features, 11.2), based on Garrard Conley‘s true-life memoir. It costars Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) as the 19-year-old Conley, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as his rigidly conventional parents, and Edgerton as a gay conversion therapist. Opening three months earlier is The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Film Rise/Vertigo, 8.3), set in 1993 and based on Emily M. Danforth’s 2012 novel. It’s about the teenaged Cameron Post (Chloe Grace Moretz) being sent to a Christian gay-conversion camp in Montana. Costarring Sasha Lane, John Gallagher Jr., Forrest Goodluck and Jennifer Ehle. Post won a Grand Jury Prize at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

I’ve spent half of today and half of yesterday looking to connect with a distinguished, non-marginal, leather-shoe-wearing, Jaguar-driving iPhone hacker who really knows his/her stuff. As I explained on 7.6, I’m grappling with a terrible iPhone 8 Plus problem. I just bought one last Friday evening after my iPhone 6 was lost and then stolen, but I can’t get past a double security measure that iOS software insists upon.

Every new iPhone owner has to submit to a two-step verification security process. They need to input their Apple ID and password (no prob), followed by a six-digit passcode that Apple would normally text them. However, the thief who stole my iPhone 6 Plus has given it a new SIM card, and has somehow convinced Apple that his/her phone # (which ends in 14) is a legitimate trusted number. Somehow this d-bag has convinced Apple that he’s me, and the bottom line is that Apple is so far refusing to accept the usual verifications that prove I am the legitimate party and not the “14” guy. There must be some kind of workaround that would allow me to sidestep the usual protocols and allow me to input a valid six-digit code.

Right now I’m frozen in my tracks. After five days of trying to get past or around this problem, an Apple senior-level support rep told me yesterday in so many words that “there’s no way we can give you the six-digit code,” and that I’m more or less screwed as far as being able to use the new iPhone 8 Plus with my current #. Moreover, last Friday a senior iPhone support person named Priscilla promised I’d be hearing soon from “a senior Apple engineer,” except (a) the engineer never got in touch and (b) I’ve called Priscilla and left messages four or five times and no response. I’m calling her again now.

There must be a way to hack around this issue, so I’m making a last-ditch public effort to find a reputable gentleman hacker who can help me out. If anyone out there can connect me with the right person or knows a surefire way to manage this, please get in touch. This is very serious. I’ve never before tried to connect with iPhone hackers, but I’ll tell you right now it’s not easy. It’s like trying to find an upscale drug dealer. They’re out there, but it’s hard to find the right number or e-mail address. I’ve also reached out to iPhone jailbreakers — not the same line of country but close.

If I can’t find a solution I guess I’ll return the iPhone 8 Plus and buy an Android and accept a whole new phone #, and then I’ll figure some way to import my contact info, photos, music and all the rest of it. I know nothing about Androids. What a nightmare. Every facet of my life has been intertwined with iPhone technology for 11 years and now, suddenly, the Apple folks have essentially told me to go to hell.

A February ’18 Forbes article by Thomas Fox-Brewster mentioned Corellium co-founder David Wang, a big name in the Apple jailbreaker community” who has “previously ported Android and Linux onto the iPhone.”

So Joaquin Phoenix is going to play the D.C. Comics Joker in an origin film directed and co-written by Todd Phillips. Honestly, who cares? How many more Joker flicks are U.S. audiences going to be asked to sit through? Jokers to the left and right…Caesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Jared Leto. There’s no end to it. Variety‘s Justin Kroll reports that Leto “will not only be back for the Suicide Squad sequel [but] is also developing his own standalone movie that will be separate from Phoenix’s Joker project.” All three are Warner Bros. projects. No one’s ever going to top Ledger’s version in The Dark Knight…never.

Posted earlier today on Facebook by Sarah Palin, referring to a prank interview that happened in Washington D.C. last November: “Yup — we were duped. Ya’ got me, Sacha. Feel better now?

“I join a long list of American public personalities who have fallen victim to the evil, exploitive, sick ‘humor’ of the British ‘comedian’ Sacha Baron Cohen, enabled and sponsored by CBS/Showtime.

“This ‘legit opportunity’ to honor American Vets and contribute to a “legit Showtime historical documentary” was requested of me via a speakers bureau.

“For my interview, my daughter and I were asked to travel across the country where Cohen (I presume) had heavily disguised himself as a disabled US Veteran, fake wheelchair and all. Out of respect for what I was led to believe would be a thoughtful discussion with someone who had served in uniform, I sat through a long ‘interview’ full of Hollywoodism’s disrespect and sarcasm — but finally had enough and literally, physically removed my mic and walked out, much to Cohen’s chagrin. The disrespect of our US military and middle-class Americans via Cohen’s foreign commentaries under the guise of interview questions was perverse.

“Here is my challenge, shallow Sacha boy: go ahead — air the footage. Experience tells us it will be heavily edited, not pretty, and intended to humiliate.

“The challenge is to Cohen, CBS and Showtime: donate all proceeds to a charitable group that actually respects and supports American Vets. Mock politicians and innocent public personalities all you want, if that lets you sleep at night, but HOW DARE YOU mock those who have fought and served our country!

“Truly sick.

By all means read the entirety of Jonathan Chait’s 7.8.18 New York article, “Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart Or His Handler?: A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.” But consider the final six paragraphs:

“The logic of Russia’s role in helping Trump has not changed since the election. If Trump’s campaign hired hackers to penetrate his opponent’s communications or voting machines, they would risk arrest. But Putin can hire hackers with impunity. Mueller can indict Russians, and he has, but he can’t arrest them unless they decide to leave Russia. Outsourcing Trump’s hacking work to Putin made perfect sense for both men in 2016, and still does.

“And if you’re Putin, embarking upon a coveted summit with the most Russophilic president since World War II, who is taking a crowbar to the alliance of your enemies, why wouldn’t you help him in 2018 and 2020?

“Ever since the fall of 2016, when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately turned down an Obama-administration proposal for a bipartisan warning to Russia not to interfere in the election, the underlying dynamic has been set: Most Republicans would rather win an election with Putin’s help than lose one without it. The Democrats, brimming with rage, threaten to investigate Russian activity if they win a chamber of Congress this November. For Putin to redouble his attack — by hacking into voting machines or some other method — would be both strategic and in keeping with his personality. Why stop now?

“Meanwhile, the White House has eliminated its top cybersecurity position. That might simply reflect a Republican bias against bureaucratic expertise. But it might also be just what it looks like: The cop on the beat is being fired because his boss is in cahoots with the crooks.

“Part Towering Inferno, part Die Hard and part test to see how much Hollywood baloney a physics-literate viewer can take before his or her head explodes, Rawson Marshall Thurber‘s Skyscraper is one of the most idiotic action movies to come down the pike in some time. Thurber’s sub-par script and the absence of a Hans Gruber-grade villain keeps this film well short of John McTiernan‘s enduring Bruce Willis crowd-pleaser, which celebrates its 30th birthday this very month. Nevertheless, multiplexes should welcome it with open arms.” — from John De Fore‘s Hollywood Reporter review.

“Ridiculous is the name of the game in Skyscraper, an eye-rolling (yet undeniably fun) action movie delivered with a straight face by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who recognizes that no one wants to watch a realistic rescue story (Cat Saved From Tree, say, or Backdraft) when they can have The Rock’s Wife and Kids Nearly Burned to a Crisp in Towering Inferno.

“On the scale that ranges from implausibly entertaining to entertainingly implausible, Skyscraper comfortably falls toward the compulsively over-the-top end, generating thrills by straining credibility at every turn, relying on Johnson’s invaluable ability to engage the audience while defying physics, common sense and the sheer limits of human stamina.” — from Peter Debruge‘s 7.10 Variety review.

Tonight the most insanely corrupt, reality-detached U.S. president in the history of this country (not to mention the most grossly overweight chief executive since William Howard Taft) nominated arch-conservative Brett Kavanaugh, 53, to succeed Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Cavanaugh is a hardline rightwing partisan. In the late 1990s, he played a lead role in a Republican attempt to remove President Bill Clinton from office. Kavanaugh was a significant co-author of the Starr Report, which urged the House to impeach Clinton for lying about receiving an Oval office blowjob from White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This 7.4 HE riff was posted when his name was first announced.

This will be my final post about Chris Nolan‘s yellow and teal-tinted version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which began playing in theatres starting last month and which will apparently be the visual basis for the forthcoming 4K Bluray that will “street” on 10.30. My last post, I mean, before the 4K version pops and I can review it.

If you have any regard for how 2001 has generally looked over the decades (theatrical projection, cable, VHS, laser disc, DVD, Bluray, high-def streaming) but especially on WHE’s 2007 Bluray, which is far and away the best purchasable version as we speak, there’s no way to regard the Nolan-ized version as anything but an outlier.

I personally think it’s a tragedy that Warner Bros. has spent over seven figures in order to add a piss-yellow tint to Kubrick’s 1968 classic and to change the color of the walls in the trippy French Chateau sequence at the finale into a very loud green instead of blue. I believe that the ghost of Stanley Kubrick is fuming and pounding the refrigerator door as he watches this happen. Nolan’s unrestored 70mm version has the wrong color tints…period. On top of which the man is allegedly red-green color blind. On top of which he didn’t even see the original 70mm 2001 when it opened roadshow in April ’68, as was he was born in July 1970.

Nolan’s non-restoration is doubly tragic because the seven-figure cost has lessened the likelihood that a serious, true-color 4K restoration of 2001 will ever be funded. I’ve been told that the 2001 negative is 95% in good shape, and that a proper 4K UHD restoration would not be a horrifically difficult thing.

I was told last weekend, in fact, that Warner Bros. has possession of the back-up YCM masters of the entire film. Using the negative would more than suffice, but WB could use the YCMs to fully restore the film to its original (or even better) digital glory. Yes, it would be an expensive exercise to do 8K scans of each of the YCM black-and-white “masters” and then pay for the realignment of these 50-year old celluloid elements to generate at new digital master of the film. And yet this would probably be superior to any 70mm print ever made of 2001, and the yellow and teal scheme would be out the window and gone for good.