The great Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave, Shame) appears to have taken an Ocean’s 8-resembling genre premise — wives of four dead felons pooling forces to complete a major robbery — and invested it with brute foreboding. Escapism eschewed in favor of Trump-era political current and commentary. Corrupt Chicago authority types vs. resourceful women of varying shades. Obviously a brew of toughness and steel, especially on the part of Viola Davis. A guy who’s seen Widows calls her “the standout, a force of nature in a showcase role…her son was murdered by police after they pulled him out of a car.” Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo. Costarring Colin Farrell (baddie), Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall, Liam Neeson.

82 year-old Lutz Ismael Ebersdorf, a German psychoanalyst and actor, is suddenly a new element in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (Amazon, 11.2), which until this morning had largely been regarded as an all-female, all-witches brew. (A Buzzfeed piece claims that Ebersdorf is actually costar Tilda Swinton under layers of makeup — if so, his Wikipedia page is a neat bit of trickery.) Flat landscapes and chilly temps, overcoats and sleet, a grayish palette and graying (not to mention flat-out white) hair, supernatural events and Tilda sucking on a cigarette. This isn’t your father’s Dario Argento realm.

Lutz Ismael Ebersdorf or Tilda Swinton?

The tag line for Walter Hill‘s Streets of Fire was “Tonight is what it means to be young.” When producer Joel Silver saw the poor box-office numbers from the opening weekend, he quipped “Tonight is what it means to be dead.” The young, foxy-sexy, leather-adorned costars of this failed 1984 Universal release are now pushing the big six-oh, if not past it.

I actually stole the above headline from a Chinatown moment in which Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) asks Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) if he’s “alone”, and Gittes replies “Isn’t everybody?” I don’t actually feel “alone” in this life. Because of Hollywood Elsewhere I feel like I’m part of a huge, roaming, fickle, transcontinental community, on top of which are the wife, the sons, the friends, the cats and the semi-close industry pallies. But at the end of the day and especially during the “hour of the wolf” or in the pre-pre-dawn hours (2:30 am to 5 am) we’re all pretty much alone in a sense. Not helpless, of course, or even lazy or weak necessarily, but whatever’s going on (or not going on) we all to have stand up and clear our heads and fix it ourselves. If we don’t do that, everyone and everything else will eventually fall away. That’s the message of High Noon, and it’s also the damn truth.

Here are two brilliant post-Solo-catastrophe riffs, but be honest — would The New Yorker and Variety have run these assessments if Solo had somehow connected and become a huge hit a la Last Jedi?

From Joshua Rothman‘s “The Growing Emptiness of the Star Wars Universe,” posted in The New Yorker on 5.31.18: “Early in William Gibson’s novel ‘Pattern Recognition,’ from 2003, Cayce Pollard, a highly paid professional ‘coolhunter,’ wanders through a London department store. Pollard is hypersensitive to the semiotics of brands: when a product is lame, she feels it physically, as a kind of pain. In the basement, she stumbles upon a display of clothes by Tommy Hilfiger. Recoiling from the ‘mountainside of Tommy,’ she thinks, ‘My God, don’t they know?’

“This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row…but Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

“I thought of this scene this weekend, after watching Solo: A Star Wars Story. “Solo” is an entertaining movie, with engaging performances, vivid production design and enthralling action sequences. It’s also distressingly forgettable — it’s about nothing, an episode of Seinfeld with hyperdrive.

“In ‘Pattern Recognition,’ Pollard wonders if Hilfiger’s blandness might be the source of his appeal: where most preppy clothes are freighted with meaning, Tommy allows you to look preppy without actually being that way. Similarly, Solo evokes Star Wars without quite being it. It isn’t the ‘null point’ of the franchise, but it’s close.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Why the Tanking of Solo is a Force of Darkness for Star Wars,” posted by Variety this morning:

“There have now been 10 Star Wars films, and right up until Solo, each and every one of them produced the kind of box-office grosses that were potent enough to bend the universe with the magnetic power of their the-whole-world-is-watching! hegemony.

In a late 1950s, pre-Civil Rights legislation, liberally-endorsed metaphor kind of way, The Defiant Ones is a completely decent film. I’m only mentioning this because the Eureka Classics Bluray pops on 6.11. Notice how I’m conveying a vaguely dismissive attitude? Should every liberal-hearted social-issues film of the prehistoric past be so denigrated? I think it’s because Stanley Kramer‘s earnestly liberal brand of cinema has been put down for so many decades. There doesn’t seem to be any other permissible attitude toward the guy. I’ve always respected his brand while understanding that it represents a certain form of pat, tidy liberalism that was put out to pasture in the late ’60s.

Late yesterday afternoon Tatyana and I were hiking the trails and neighborhoods of Topanga Canyon. The sun was going down and the atmosphere was warm and fragrant and altogether perfect except for the flies, but while walking on Encina Road a couple of weird, vaguely negative encounters with older Topanga women occured.

Encounter #1: We were heading back to Entrada Road when a late 50ish hippie-chick type wearing a half-pound of mascara approached with the oldest and fattest Chihuahua I’ve ever seen in my life. It was as if the poor dog, who appeared to be in his mid 80s in canine years, had been eating nothing but cupcakes and french fries his entire life. I shouldn’t have said anything, but for some reason I blurted something about her dog being in his declining years.

Mascara hippie chick stopped and turned and said, “Why did you just say that?” Me: “Sorry…it was the first thing that came into my mind.”

In fact, I lied — the first thing that came into my mind was that this poor dog would most likely be dead from a heart attack within six months or even sooner, and so I translated this observation into a vague remark about dotage.

“Well, I just got him from the pound,” the woman said with a steely, half-hostile smile, “and my first thought was that he’s beautiful.” I said something approving — “Sounds good!” — and we walked away. God, some people. We all understand love and compassion for mistreated animals, but the dog was clearly withered and not even close to healthy. Some things are better left unsaid. My bad.

Donald Trump’s totally unmitigated bullshit stream is “not a bug — it’s a feature.”

Sam Harris: “In large measure the Trump cult is a response to some of the excesses we’ve seen on the left. I consider myself liberal more or less across the board. But the identity politics and political correctness we’ve seen on the left has clearly created a backlash,” and so Trump and his supporters are basically saying they’ve “just had enough. But in this instance the cure, if you will, is much worse than the disease here. Identity politics on the left is now ushering in a [theology] of white identity politics, not just in America but in many western countries…we need to find some path in which our common humanity is the only basis upon which we reason and decide our path into the future.”

Something in me deflates when I see some younger guy wearing dorky-looking footwear, particularly those awful white-rimmed Nikes that Millennials are so fond of or any kind of half-plastic, half-canvas combo, including gray or loud-color cross-training shoes, atrocious sandals, Crocs, etc.

Do younger GenYs, Millennials and GenZs have the worst taste in shoes in the history of western civilization? That sounds over-the-top but think about it. How many under-40 males wear super-cool-looking Italian shoes (and I don’t just mean traditional leather) on any kind of regular basis? Answer: Almost none. How many hinterland tourists wear X-factor shoes of any kind? Same difference. Whenever I notice someone wearing great-looking shoes I’ll sometimes tell them so, but I can’t remember the last time this happened in Los Angeles.

The only region in the world in which guys wear great-looking shoes with any frequency is Northern Italy, and even then it’s a spotty proposition. Older, silver-haired Italian guys are the standard-bearers. Under-40s, even in Italy, are almost uniformly opposed to what I sometimes call the Daniel Day Lewis or Bruno Magli aesthetic.

The 50th anniversary Broadway presentation of Mart Crowley‘s The Boys in the Band opened a couple of days ago. The reviews have been pretty good, Ben Brantley notwithstanding. Not being in New York and probably reluctant to shell out $300-plus for a pair of tickets if I were, I’ve done the next best thing — i.e., ordered the Kino Classics Bluray of William Friedkin’s 1970 big-screen adaptation.

If a just-opened film contains a big surprise, critics will usually observe silence until the first-weekend crowd has had a chance to catch it. Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich has thrown that rule out the window. This morning he spoiled the big secret in Baltasar Kormakur‘s Adrift. Ehrlich’s article allows Kormakur to explain his reasons for inserting a big fake-out (“Adrift Director Baltasar Kormákur Explains the Reasoning Behind the Movie’s Wild Plot Twist”).

As long as the cat is out of the bag and presuming that at least some HE readers have seen Adrift last night, what are the reactions?

HE riff, posted a couple of days ago: “You can tell right away that Adrift wants to deliver coo-coo romantic vibes for its target audience (i.e., younger women, couples). Loving currents first and surviving nature’s wrath second. This strategic determination, crafted by screenwriters Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith and obviously agreed to by Kormakur, results in a significant third-act revelation or confession that reveals their lying, cheating hearts.

“Adrift creators to audience: “We wanted to give you a film about a young, loving, struggling-to-survive couple, and we did that for the most part so too effing bad if we flim-flammed you. Get over it. Life is full of fake-outs and people dealing from the bottom of the deck. We didn’t do anything that bad. Have some more popcorn.”