Next week Fox Home Entertainment’s Schawn Belston and James Finn are presenting a special 70mm screening of James Cameron‘s The Abyss (’89). I asked if they’re showing the original 140-minute theatrical version or the 171-minute special edition (i.e., the version that ends with shots of huge tidal waves) — no answer thus far.

I began to recall The Abyss in detail after receiving the invite. I can’t attend due to a screening conflict (the Sicario: Day of the Soldado all-media in Burbank) but even if I could I’m not sure I’d be all that enthused. It’s been 29 years, but I have two strong recollections: (a) The first two thirds are fairly riveting but (b) the last third drops the ball, especially when Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio is brought back to life by Ed Harris after clearly drowning, and especially that dippy ending with the aquatic alien butterflies.

There’s never been a Bluray of either version of The Abyss, and you can’t stream them in high-def. Abyss Wikipage: “In July 2016, while promoting the 30th anniversary Bluray release of Aliens at Comic-Con, Cameron confirmed that he was working on a remastered 4K transfer of The Abyss and that it would be released on Bluray for the first time in early 2017. ‘We’ve done a wet-gate 4K scan of the original negative, and it’s going to look insanely good,’ Cameron said.” Okay, but something kept this from happening.

The hilarious part about Vertical Entertainment’s “hit back at the critics” ad is the chanting of the crowd…”GottEE!, GottEE!, GottEE!” Presumably the makers had to round up a few people to stand in front of a mike and chant. Were they professional actors (doubtful) or Vertical Entertainment employees or…? I wish I knew the story behind this.

Audiences loved Gotti but critics don’t want you to see it… The question is why? Trust the people and see it for yourself! pic.twitter.com/K6a9jAO4UH

— Gotti Film (@Gotti_Film) June 19, 2018

It would appear that Ari Aster‘s Hereditary, the smarthouse horror flick that opened 12 days ago, is doing reasonably well despite that notorious D-plus CinemaScore grade.

Boilerplate horror fans put it down, but an obviously sizable contingent of “blue state” viewers have kept things going. The current domestic gross is $27,016,183 — underwhelming by big-studio standards but the second-highest grosser in A24’s six-year history.

A24’s most popular film to date is Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, which has earned a bit less than $49 million domestic and a worldwide haul of $76,858,273.

Video posted three days ago: Last Wednesday night (6.13) a Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles performance of Henry IV came to a screeching halt because an audience member was “suffering from a hydration issue,” according to a Playbill description. (An audience member lost consciousness because of insufficient water intake?) To keep things going during the delay, star Tom Hanks ad-libbed for several minutes. Hats off. Henry IV, performing at West L.A.’s Japanese Garden, will continue through July 1.

It’s not so much what N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman has said in his latest (6.18) essay, although his conclusions about the ways in which Donald Trump has downgraded our country’s reputation and is ignoring or undermining traditional values certainly inspire alarm.

It’s the fact that Krugman has titled the piece “Fall of the American Empire,” which conveys a glum air of resignation while sounding like a Samuel Bronston film.

First two paragraphs: “The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

“What do these stories have in common? Obviously they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there’s also a larger context, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. What we’re witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values — the values that actually made America great.”

For a scene in his currently filming Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino recently re-dressed the Cinerama Dome with advertising for Bernard L. Kowalski‘s Krakatoa, East of Java, a stinker disaster flick that opened on May 14, 1969. It was only up for a single day, I’m told — last Tuesday (6.12).

“Which is worse? A heartless, soulless blockbuster with no wit, intelligence or shelf life, designed solely to milk money from moviegoers in the quickest and most cynical way possible? Or a film which presents itself to be a poignant, intelligent, moving work of art, only to emerge as a bloated, pretentious, self-indulgent piece of crap? For most of us, the obvious answer is the former. But that all changes once you’ve seen The Deer Hunter.

“At the risk of slowly making myself unpopular, let me be perfectly clear from the outset. The Deer Hunter is a truly hateful film, a badly-written, badly-directed, poorly-acted piece of garbage, at turns boring, racist, mawkish, churlish, pretentious and manipulative. It is in a very select group of films which are almost unendurable due to length, structure, tone and content. It is an utterly hollow experience which leaves its audience somewhere between slipping into a coma and erupting into blind fury.” — Daniel Mumby, Three Men on a Blog, posted on 12.9.10.

I haven’t asked to see the opening episodes of Taylor Sheridan‘s Yellowstone (Paramount Network, 6.20), the sprawling, Montana-shot, big-ranch, family-conflict drama starring Kevin Costner, but I can at least convey that it’s gotten creamed by the critics — 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, 62% on Metacritic. I wouldn’t dare to summarize, but there are gripes galore.

I’ve finally figured out that on Direct TV, the Paramount Network is channel #241 so I guess I’ll tune in. Maybe. We’ll see.

Costner plays the somewhat taciturn John Dutton, a half-tough, half-laid-back Big Daddy brah in a black cowboy hat. Weary hangs the bison head. Everybody wants a piece of his land or his soul, some more than others. His four grown children, corporate developers, Native American activists, Montana politicians. It’s that kind of ensemble.

“Expensive to look at, painfully slow, lovingly violent, overly dedicated to uncovering the secret sadness lingering in the heart of murderous egomaniacs, generally pointless.”

I’ve read seven or eight reviews so far, and my favorite is by EW.com’s Darren Franich. That’s where the above line is from. I’d go so far as to call his review hilarious.

Three of the four Dutton children are “dangerously boring,” Franich notes. “The fourth is Beth, a man-eating boozehound tycoon played with Sin City hyperbole by Kelly Reilly.

“I’m watching the second episode, and John’s son Kayce (Luke Grimes) has just discovered dinosaur bones in his backyard.

“He discovered them because there was a tree stump on his property that was bothering him, and he tried to pull it out with a tractor, and then he just used dynamite. And now John himself is here, theorizing that the dinosaur was probably killed by a prehistoric shark. One thing I wasn’t expecting was Kevin Costner talking about dinosaur-eating sharks.

“Strange things keep happening to Kayce. Later in episode 2, he’s going for a drive with his wife (Kelsey Asbille), and they’re driving by a random house, and that house explodes. ‘Meth lab’s my guess,’ Kayce drawls, as he runs toward the explosion. So now Yellowstone is just a show where houses blow up sometimes.

From Todd McCarthy’s THR Sundance review, filed on 1.24.18: “The first thing people will always say about Searching (Screen Gems, 8.3) is, ‘Oh, yeah, the film that’s completely set on a computer screen.’ But if it were just that, it would be far from enough.

“Impressively, first-time filmmaker and former Google commercials creator Aneesh Chaganty has also made a real movie, the story of a family that morphs into a crime drama that gradually ratchets up the tension as all good thrillers must, one that’s well constructed and acted as well as novel in its storytelling techniques.

“[The pic] is like spending a little over an hour-and-a-half on the internet, except that a mind perhaps more wily than yours is organizing your online voyage. Early on you’re made to feel that you’re in good hands, such is the technical and dramatic expertise Chaganty, co-writer Sev Ohanian, editors Will Merrick and Nick Johnson (what a job they must have had!) and the rest of the team pour into this novel enterprise.

“Unavoidably, perhaps, Search starts feeling more like a conventional suspense film once the deep probe for information on the internet is over and the film enters real time and a possible resolution; there are a lot of present-tense cutaways to TV coverage and a reliance upon surveillance coverage cameras. By this time, too, some of the novelty has also begun to wear off, but there are a couple of good twists in a plot that’s pretty solid strictly from a crime story point of view.

“In all respects, what Chaganty and his team have pulled off here is something both novel and accomplished.” Rotten Tomatoes, 100%, Metacritic 81%.

“Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border,” posted by ProPublica’s Ginger Thompson at 3:51 pm Eastern: “An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children.

“The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. ‘Well, we have an orchestra here,’ he jokes. ‘What’s missing is a conductor.’

Season #5 of House of Cards ended with Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) resigning from the Oval Office, leaving Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) as the 47th U.S. President. Frank and Claire had agreed that she would pardon him of all crimes. Then Claire changes her mind. The season ends with Claire ignoring Frank’s multiple calls, and then breaking the fourth wall with a message for viewers: “My turn.”

Robin Wright as President Claire Underwood in the final season of House of Cards.

Spacey was dismissed from the Netflix series following multiple charges of sexual harassment, but how will Frank Underwood be eliminated from season #6? Will he die from illness, commit “suicide” (i.e., killed in such a way as it looks like suicide), perish in a plane crash, die from plutonium poisoning by the Russian president, or be pushed in front of a train by a friend or relative of one of Underwood’s many victims?

The trick, of course, is that Underwood has to die without Spacey’s participation.

The final House of Cards season will begin sometime in the fall, and will last for eight episodes. Claire Underwood calling the shots and icing her enemies! Costarring Diane Lane, Greg Kinnear, Cody Fern, Michael Kelly, Jayne Atkinson, Patricia Clarkson, Constance Zimmer, Derek Cecil, Campbell Scott and Boris McGiver.

The main thing about Eugene Jarecki‘s The King is that it’s less of a “rise and fall of Elvis” film than a meditative road-trip essay about the cultural decline of the U.S. of A. over the last…oh, call it 60 years. But with doses of music and feeling and irony and currents of straight talk. It’s a stirring musical sermon. How did we get here? Then vs. now. The bloat, the denial, the loathing…a nation arguably more at war with itself than at any time since the Civil War. Paul Simon rewrite: “We’re empty and aching and don’t know why.”

Well, actually we do. The same forces that gradually enveloped that young and jumpy Memphis rocker who exploded in the South in ’55 and then nationally in 1956 with a blend of rockabilly and white-boy soul…the musical-spiritual aura that defined him gradually dispersed, and then selling out became the be-all, the chimes of irrelevance…shitty movies, Las Vegas gigs instead of touring the country, Dr. Feelgood medication, endlessly beholden to Colonel Tom Parker, huddling with the Memphis mafia behind Graceland gates. A flamboyant, increasingly perverse, go-for-the-dough lifestyle that pretty much drained and ate him.

13 year-old country blues singer Emi Sunshine, who takes a ride in Elvis’s silver Rolls Royce and sings some tunes in Jarecki’s doc, and Mr. Jarecki himself — Tuesday, 3.6, following screening at UTA.

It can’t hurt to repost the official synopsis: “A musical road trip across America that explores how a country boy lost his authenticity and became a king while his country lost its democracy and became an empire.” 27 words. Marketers would say trim it down. “A half-musical, all-visual poem about how the Las Vegas aesthetic swallowed America in the same way it swallowed Elvis Presley.” Still too long?

As noted everywhere, The King itself was trimmed after its world debut at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, when it ran 117 minutes. Now it’s around 97.

My first viewing of The King happened three and a half months ago inside United Talent Agency headquarters. In a HE piece that posted on 3.6 (“King of Drain“), I said I was “pretty close to knocked out — touched and shaken to the depths of whatever — and I’ll eat my black Kenneth Cole desert boots if it doesn’t become a Best Feature Documentary nominee next January. It’s that good, that bell-ringy, that profound.”

Now the hour is nigh — The King (Oscilloscope) opens on 6.22.

The King isn’t the least bit grim or draining or forlorn — as you watch there’s a feeling that all the cultural threads and fibres have been woven just so. Not an Elvis doc, not an Elvis doc, not an Elvis doc…but a telling of his story (which most of us know backwards and forwards) in a way that expands and deepens and makes you lean forward.

Every talking head has two or three sage things to say: Greil Marcus, James Carville, Chuck D, Alec Baldwin, Roseanne Cash, Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris, Van Jones, Ashton Kutcher, Mike Myers, Dan Rather, Luc Sante, David Simon, Linda Thompson. My favorites are Hawke, Jones and Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

I was actually a tiny bit sorry when The King ended.