15 months after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Andrew Dosonmu‘s Where is Kyra? is opening this Friday (4.6). I’ve been saying all along that it’s “grade A within its realm” and that Michelle Pfeiffer‘s performance is quite the tour de force, but it’s the kind of film that will empty your soul and drain you of any will to live.

I’m not disagreeing with Village Voice critic Bilge Ebiri, whose just-posted article, “Michelle Pfeiffer Gives the Performance of Her Life in Where Is Kyra?“, teems with high praise; I’m saying “yeah, it’s very well made but don’t see it if you’re the type that occasionally thinks about suicide because it’ll push you into the abyss.”

I mentioned this impression to Ebiri this morning, and he replied “good…a movie that can convey the exhaustion and desperation of poverty to that degree is essential, and rare.” Yeah, it conveys that, all right, but I know if I consider this kind of creative deliverance to be “essential.”

Here’s how Ebiri puts it in his Voice piece: “[Dosunmu] and cinematographer Bradford Young sheathe Kyra in oppressive darkness, and they hold on her for extended periods, even when other characters are speaking or acting. Close-ups often show her half-concealed in the gloom, emerging from pitch-black corners of the screen. No lamp gives off enough light, no street scene is bright enough. A pall has descended over this woman’s life. Rarely on film has the sheer debilitating exhaustion of poverty been conveyed so clearly.”

Here‘s how I put it on 1.24.17: “A funereal quicksand piece about an unemployed middle-aged woman (Pfeiffer) in a terrible financial jam, and about a relationship she has with a fellow down-and-outer (Keifer Sutherland), Where Is Kyra? is a carefully calibrated, well-acted gloomhead flick that feels like it’s happening inside a coffin or crypt.

“This is Dosunmu’s deliberate strategy, of course, but the end-of-the-road, my-life-is-over vibe is primarily manifested by the inky, mineshaft palette of dp Bradford Young — HE’s least favorite cinematographer by a country mile.”

Most of yesterday afternoon was about hiking in Sullivan Canyon, a leafy, horse-trail community just west of Mandeville Canyon. We defied the posted warnings and parked on Old Ranch Road, about 1/2 mile north of Sunset. We walked up a horse trail to Sullivan Canyon trail, which goes on and on. By the time we were back to the junction of Sunset and Old Ranch we’d hiked five miles.

We also checked out Diane Keaton’s super-sized, industrial-chic home, which was written about last October in Architectural Digest. Keaton also published a book about it — “The House That Pinterest Built.” We only scoped out the exterior, of course. It’s magnificent and exacting, so beautifully textured and all of a piece in so many ways, but at the same time (here it comes) so immaculate that it feels more like the workspace of an enlightened, forward-thinking company (it reminded me a bit of J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot headquarters) than what most of us would call a “home.”

Homes need to feel imperfect and lived in and just a little ramshackle — a tad sloppy and messy with the scent of white clam sauce and peanut butter and sliced lemons, and maybe a hint of cat poop. A good home always has magazines and books and vinyl LPs all over the place, not to mention flatscreens and blankets draped over couches and at least three or four cats and dogs hanging around. Keaton’s place might feel homier inside, but the exterior feels a bit too precise. It’s also fairly awesome.

Oh, and there’s hardly any tree-shade in the front yard of Keaton’s place. Warren Beatty once said that great-looking hair constitutes 60% of a woman’s attractiveness; by the same token a great-looking home needs great trees (sycamores, jacaranda, lemon eucalyptus, pin oak) to drop a few hundred leaves and shade the place up.

6:15 pm update: I just ran into Warren Beatty and Annette Bening at Le Pain Quotidien on Melrose…honest! I told him I loved the quote about hair constituting 60% of a woman’s beauty or appeal, and he said, “I don’t think I ever said it.” Huh. “You read this somewhere?,” he asked. Yeah, I said. In an article about Diane Keaton or about her home, and just this morning. I definitely didn’t invent it, I emphasized, but I love the observation regardless.

Diane Keaton’s spacious, self-designed home, just around the corner from Old Ranch Road and exactingly designed like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Built in Sullivan Canyon in 1956, Mandalay (2200 Old Ranch Road) was a sprawling, one-story home designed by architect Cliff May, who is regarded as the creator of the California Ranch-style house (i.e., early 1930s). May died in 1989. The Mandalay property was bought, destroyed and redeveloped. The big gate looks like the entrance to Jurassic Park.

Self explanatory but for clarity’s sake, HBO’s John Oliver has summarized the situation as follows: “Nothing says ‘we value independent media’ like dozens of reporters forced to repeat the same message over and over again, like members of a brainwashed cult.”

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018

The across-the-board Orwellian script was obtained and published by the Seattle Post Intelligencer last Thursday:

“Hi, I’m (A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________…

(B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our [local] communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces.

(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Sometime in early ’97. Scroll forward to the 17-minute mark:

From critic, documentarian and film series host Marshall Fine: “My favorite movie of the moment is A Quiet Place (Paramount, 4.6). Much more emotionally compelling than Don’t Breathe or any of your average thrillers. Showed it at my film club (had the producers there for a q & a), which is a suburban NY 60-plus crowd — they walked in not knowing what they were going to see (they never do). Three older women walked out an hour in (one said ‘it’s good but it’s too intense for me’); otherwise, a hit with my audience, which is quite a different thing than, say, a SXSW gathering.” John Krasinki‘s film premiered in Austin on 3.9.

I’ve mentioned before that my first viewing of George Lucas‘s THX-1138 happened during a 24-hour FILMEX sci-fi marathon, which happened in ’74 or ’75. The screening began around 4 or 4:30 am. I remember getting up at 3 or 3:15 am and driving over to Century City Plitt theatres in the dark. There’s nothing quite as pulverizing as watching a sci-fi film at 4:30 am, your system just starting to feel revved with that first jolt of caffeine. I’ve never forgotten that computer greeting Robert Duvall hears with each and every log-on — “what’s wrong?” I say this to my cats when they want something. They look at me and I say “what’s wrong?”, in that exact same computer voice.

Woody Allen‘s Play It Again, Sam opened at the Broadhurst theatre on 2.12.69 and ran for just over a year, closing on 3.14.70. Directed by Joseph Hardy, the cast included Allen as Allan Felix, Diane Keaton as Linda Christie, Tony Roberts as Dick Christie and Jerry Lacy as the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. Allen left the show near the end of its run and was replaced by Bob Denver. It was while auditioning for the play that Keaton first met Allen; they became romantically involved but broke up after a year. The biography [below] is from the Play it Again, Sam copy of Playbill.

(l. to r.) Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, Jerry Lacy.

I regret to say that Garry Shandling told several penis jokes in his day, and every last one of them makes me cringe. Because of that godawful word, I mean. I’ve said this once or twice before but I really and truly want to see that icky and contemptible term retired, and that includes being removed from each and every English dictionary, dead-tree or online. I make a face each and every time I hear it because it assigns or associates the menial and moderately offensive task of waste disposal to an organ that is primarily about love and rapture and hormonal mountain-climbing, not to mention shouldering a metaphor for the primal love of life. The substitute terms are schlong, junk, Johnson or schtufenhaufer. I mean it. There are dozens if not hundreds of words that have become obsolete due to not being used — zounds, sweetmeats, smite, fourscore, etc. I’m merely talking about adding another to the list.

Ex-wife: Did you watch the Garry Shandling HBO special [i.e., The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling]?
Me: Been meaning to….the four and a half hour length has been giving me pause….why?
Ex-wife: Really moving.
Me: Okay, I’ll watch it tonight. Of half tonight and half tomorrow or something. Moving how? What was the big moment?
Ex-wife: He never recovered from the death of his brother when he was a kid.

Easter means nothing to me. Not since I turned 14 or 15. Okay, maybe when the kids were young in the early ’90s and we all went on a couple of easter egg hunts. But don’t even think of pulling that shit now.

If I’m so inclined there’s one way to bring it all back, to revisit that time in my life when Easter service at our local Episcopal church and Palm Sunday and chocolate rabbits were actually “things” of some value, and that’s listening to Miklos Rozsa‘s Biblical film scores. I’ve said this three or four times since HE launched, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rozsa really had soul.

Posted 15 years ago: “Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray‘s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rozsa described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and ask yourself if Rozsa didn’t capture the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than what Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan and producer Samuel Bronston managed to throw together.

“I don’t know if it’s commonly known, but the “buhhhm-ba-dum-dum” theme from Jack Webb‘s Dragnet TV series was taken from Roza’s score for The Killers. Here’s Rozsa’s bum-da-dum-dum in the opening credits for that 1946 noir classic.

Last night Tatyana and I watched David Dobkin‘s Wedding Crashers. Third time for me, but the last time was the late summer of ’05 — almost 13 years ago. All butter and gravy. Hardly any diminishment except for one scene. Dobkin’s comic emphasis was utterly brilliant in this film — lightning in a bottle. And since ’05, he hasn’t exactly been channelling the right stuff. He directed Fred Claus (’07), The Change-Up (’11) and The Judge (’13) + produced a lot of films.

Wedding Crashers lasts two hours (usually but not always about 10 minutes too long for a comedy), and it almost never sacrifices story tension. And the money! It did $209,255,921 domestic and $76 million foreign for a worldwide tally of $285,176,741.

Owen Wilson (36 during filming, turning 50 on 11.18.18) looks incredibly young, and Vince Vaughn…well, nobody ever gave a funnier big-screen performance, and I’m including Seth Rogen, Jim Carrey, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Harold Lloyd and Bob Hope in his 1950s heyday. Bradley Cooper hadn’t even happened at that point, and I’d forgotten about “motorboating.”

Read this 6.23.17 Tim Grierson recap piece (“The Oral History of Wedding Crashers, or: How does it feel having worked on this generation’s Animal House?”).

The diminishment comes with the attempted nocturnal gay-rape scene between Vaughn and Keir O’Donnell. Nowadays a scene like this would never even be considered in the script stage, much less shot and included in the final cut. Remember how Vaughn got in trouble back in 2010 for saying “gay electric cars” in Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma, and how the scene had to be removed?

Yesterday Indiewire‘s Kate Erbland devoted one of her “Girl Talk” columns to a piece about the retired-until-further-notice Cameron Diaz. It was basically a career-summary piece along the lines of what I wrote on 3.15. What blows my mind is that Erbland (a) considers Roger Kumble‘s The Sweetest Thing to be one of Diaz’s most engaging films, despite being one of the most inane piece-of-shit comedies I ever walked out on with a 26% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and (b) she completely ignored what I regard as her best film, Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, in which she gave her career-best performance. Erbland obviously doesn’t have to agree with me, but she didn’t even mention the Hanson, which has an RT rating of 75%.