5:02 pm update: Remember Matt Damon talking about having shot an Ocean’s 8 cameo? Well, he’s been cut from the film over mansplaining. George Clooney‘s Danny Ocean is “dead at the beginning and also the end when Debbie Ocean visits his grave,” a friend says. The only person from the Soderbergh Ocean flicks is Elliot Gould, who appears in just one scene.

Earlier: Manhattan get-around guy Bill McCuddy got me going on a question about the salaries on Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros., 6.8). It’s a bit of a chickenshit thing to bring up but what the hell. The idea is this: Pay equality is a very big issue these days in progressive circles (i.e., opposition to this or that actor getting paid more than this or that actress on the same film if she has roughly the same billing and screen time), but perhaps the equality thing receded when it came to an ensemble flick about heisting the Met gala?

Ocean’s 8 only cost about $70 million so nobody got any huge prima donna paydays, but I’m guessing that Sandra Bullock was paid the most, followed by Cate Blanchett and Rihanna and then…?

A producer friend: “It’s not in the upfront quote on a film like this. This was probably a lowball favored nations. You can’t make this movie paying each cast member their quote. Crazy expensive. The big money on a picture like this is in the back-end deal. If the movie hits, you make a serious amount of dough. You let go of the big upfront salary and negotiate a lucrative profit participation.

“True story: George Clooney sent Julia Roberts the Ocean’s 11 script with a ten-dollar bill inside along with a note that said ‘we heard you got ten for a picture so we included it with the script. Hope you like it.’ Roberts thought the note was hilarious and said yes.

“The message was that nobody was getting their quote. It’s also in the spirit of being on the team. No prima donnas. Not an upfront paycheck deal. In it to make a movie that makes money at the box-office. That said, I’m sure the profit participation cash deal [on Ocean’s 8] was very, very healthy.”

Bloody Disgusting‘s John Squires is reporting that David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake, which almost everyone hated when it played in Cannes last month, is now a December release. A24 had originally planned to release it later this month (6.22), but the buzz was so bad they obviously got the willies. They’ve almost certainly asked Mitchell to go back to the editing room and tighten up his 139-minute film, and perhaps even do a little re-shooting. The new A24 release date is 12.7.18.

From “Mitchell’s Wandering Fartscape“, posted on 5.16.18: I’m sorry but David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake (A24, 6.22), which I saw early this morning, is mostly a floundering, incoherent mess. Yeah, I know — Mitchell wanted it to feel this way, right? Ironically, I mean. Confusion and mental haziness were part of the impressionistic thrust.

It’s pretty much a textbook example of what happens when a gifted, financially successful director without much on his mind at the time…this is what happens when such a fellow comes to believe that he’s a version of Federico Fellini in the wake of La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 and thereby obtains the funds to make whatever the hell he wants, and so he decides to create…uhm, well let’s try our hand at an impressionistic fantasia dreamtrip about L.A. hipster weirdness and…you know, dreamy fantasy women with nice breasts and impressionistic effluvia and whatever-the-fuck-else.

Two hours and 15 minutes of infuriating slacker nothingness…everyone’s vaguely confused, nobody really knows anything, all kinds of clues and hints about seemingly impenetrable conspiracies involving general L.A. space-case culture, bodies of dead dogs, cults, riddles and obsessions of the super-rich.

I’ve always hated Harold Ramis‘s Caddyshack, and I don’t care how much money it made or how cultish it is now. I hated it from the very first shot of that animatronic gopher, and so did Doug Kenney so don’t tell me. It taught me to vaguely dislike Chevy Chase. It turned me off to the Rodney Dangerfield thing and made me think twice about Bill Murray. (I didn’t come back to Murray until Tootsie, which opened two years later.) It’s a low, sloppy, catch-as-catch-can cocaine comedy. And now there’s a book about it by Chris Nashawaty? Seriously? On top of which I’ve always hated golf, golfers, golf apparel, golf courses, clubhouses, gin and tonics…that whole culture.

Terrence Malick‘s latest film is Radegund, a German-language drama about Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl). Pic shot in Europe during the mid-to-late summer of ’16. During the 2017 Berlinale it was forecasted by Variety to open in late ’17. (Hah!) When that didn’t happen forecasters began predicting some kind of 2018 debut, if not theatrically then at least at the elite September film festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto).

HE has asked around, and the betting is that Radegund will continue to hide its face until the February 2019 Berlinale, if that. Malick has always taken his sweet-ass time in post. He takes around two years per film and sometimes longer — Tree of Life, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song. (The latter began filming with costar Rooney Mara in 2012 and didn’t open until March of ’17.)

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if Radegund turns up closer to next year’s Cannes Film Festival or even, don’t laugh, during Venice/Telluride/Toronto of ’19. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t appear until 2020.

There’s no reliable timetable when it comes to Mr. Wackadoodle. He likes to shuffle and re-shuffle and think things through, and then re-shuffle and re-shuffle and then toss the lettuce leaves into the air as he twirls three times while chanting, adding lemon and olive oil and re-shuffling all over again, and then going outside and re-thinking it all during long walks.

Radegund costars Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist (who died in June ’17, roughly ten months after giving his performance), Jurgen Prochnow, Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruno Ganz.

Jagerstatter was an Austrian farmer who refused to take on combat duties after being conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. He was immediately arrested and executed by guillotine later in the same year at the age of 36. Jagerstatter was born and is buried in the Austrian village St. Radegund, named after the sixth-century German princess and saint.

I think the Samantha Bee thing is starting to go away. President Trump delivered the coup de grace when he suggested there was some kind of quid pro quo between Bee calling his daughter Ivanka a “feckless cunt” and Roseanne Barr equating Valerie Jarrett with Planet of the Apes, and that Bee should be canned, etc.

A 6.1 Boston Globe piece by Stephanie Ebbert called “Why The C-Word Is Still The Third Rail of Profanity” is probably the last gasp. It’s an ugly term, but not as toxic as the “n” word. Gay guys have been using it for as long as I can remember, Julie Christie angrily applied the term to Lee Grant in Shampoo, it’s heard a good 25 or 30 times in Sexy Beast (Ian McShane to a group of London gangsters: “Gentlemen! You’re all cunts”), and yesterday Sally Field said Bee didn’t use a harsh enough term to describe Ivanka. (Or something like that.) It’s been 36 hours — time to let it go.

Rabbi to Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix: “Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs. God has children and…what, a dog? A collie maybe? God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor, and very angry.”

The best part of this theological discussion scene comes when Mannix leaves the meeting, his assistant asks “how’d you do?” and he throws up his hands and says “I dunno…fine…what’s up?”

Repeating earlier verdict: I re-watched Hail Caesar! the other night, and it still doesn’t work. The worst parts are the political discussion scenes out at the commie-kidnapper screenwriters’ bungalow, and the bit when traitor Channing Tatum drops the $100K into the sea in order to catch the little white dog. But it works in pieces.

In Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now, there are two clear descriptions of or projections about Martin Sheen‘s Cpt. Willard being the ultimate messenger — a guy who, when he returns to the U.S. of A., will set the world straight about what Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kurtz was actually up to in his Cambodian Angkor Wat-like hideaway. Twice a hope is expressed that Willard will do this.

Kurtz to Willard: “I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything…everything I did, everything you saw…because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me.”

If you’re paying $18 for a movie ticket, as I did the other night at the Arclight to see First Reformed, why not make it $20? You plus your girlfriend/wife or kid and you’ve spent $36. Popcorn and whatnot is another $10 or $12 each — call it $60. Plus whatever you’re paying for parking. Going out to a movie used to be a relatively cheap date. And these days most of the films in the big plexes are shit so is anyone surprised that attendance is down?

I realize that Joe Shrapnel has written about subjects other than war and violence — his credits include Against All Enemies, Circle of Treason, Live Die Repeat and Repeat, Race, Frankie & Alice — but I would imagine he experienced some career difficulty. “Joe Shrapnel wants to write a tender love story or a screenplay about young kids…how would that work?” I would imagine that having that last name is like being named “Sue” by Johnny Cash or being called Joe Machine Gun or Joe Flame Thrower.

Robert F. Kennedy, whose appeal was so galvanizing that even the bumblefucks of the late ’60s (i.e., voters who later flocked to George Wallace in ’72) were supporting him, was shot to death in Los Angeles almost exactly 50 years ago. The anniversary happens on Monday, 6.4.18.** As with so many things, I doubt if many Millennials have paid attention to the RFK thing or will care all that much about this somber occasion. Certainly not Generation Z. They have enough aggravation.

This country was rocked hard for just over two months (precisely 64 days) in the spring or ’68. First came the elation among the antiwar left — call it euphoria — that followed Lyndon Johnson‘s decision not to run for president, which he announced on 3.31.68. Then the horror of Martin Luther King‘s assassination four days later, on 4.4.68. And then RFK’s murder exactly 60 days after that.

The tone of things turned bitter when Kennedy finally died in the wee hours of 6.6. Everyone deflated. People couldn’t stop shaking their heads. That funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the people standing by the tracks as the funeral train (NYC to Washington, D.C.) rode by, etc. All of it. Everything was dark and forlorn.

And then Richard Nixon beat the spineless, wishy-washy, LBJ-fellating Hubert Humphrey, and the dog-whistle Southern Strategy become the Republican playbook, etc.

** RFK was actually shot just after midnight on 6.5.68.

I got started late today because of a spotty sleeping night. And I’m accompanying Tatyana to the dreaded Cole Avenue DMV (God, I hate that place) at 1:30 pm so she can take her written driving test. I have an hour left before we leave so my usual quota of stories (five or six) will be on the short side, I’m afraid, although I’ll probably jump into things later this afternoon.

I awoke at 5:15 am (I so love that feeling of pre-dawn solace and serenity) but crashed again at 7:30 am. I could have started workthat getting required sleep is more important than doing the work, so it’s partly her fault.

From “Will Dormer vs. Fitful Sleep,” posted on 1.3.18: “For decades my sleep pattern was to get about six hours, midnight or 1 am to 6 or 7 am. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken a one-hour nap around 2 or 3 pm on the couch. But every now and then (i.e., usually when I’m really stressed about something) I’ll become a fitful sleeper, and that means a 3 or 3:30 or 4 am wake-up, which always results in (a) moving to the living room couch for a 90-to-120-minute Twitter session. (b) finally returning to sleep around 6 or 6:30 am, and (c) waking again at 9 or even 9:30 or 10 am.

In short, I go through periods in which I am almost Al Pacino in Insomnia. But not quite.

I’m sorry but this is a really superb, beautifully written third-act scene. Not to mention the acting. Jig’s up, end of my rope, gas tank empty, I’m done but thanks anyway. Perfect in every way.