According to most critics, Loving Pablo, which was screened at last September’s Venice and Toronto film festivals, isn’t good enough. Basically a hold-your-nose-and-cash-the-paycheck thing for costars Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard. 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, 44% on Metacritic. Based on Virginia Vallejo´s memoir, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa and, of course. no American theatrical distributor. Netflix’s Narcos series, Escobar: Paradise Lost with Benicio del Toro, The Infiltrator, this thing…how many Pablo Escobar dramas can the market support? I’d like to see it anyway — one of the streaming services should step up.

Is there anyone who didn’t know for a dead cold fact that sooner or later a driverless Uber would kill a pedestrian? Last night’s “autonomous” slaying in Tempe happened around 10 pm. It involved a 49 year-old woman who was walking with her bicycle.

Funniest N.Y. Times paragraph: “Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior.”

The above news report says that the woman was “not using the crosswalk.” The autonomous Uber had undoubtedly been programmed — instructed — to not hit pedestrians walking in designated crossing areas, so technically the woman may have been at fault by crossing in a wide-open zone. If George C. Scott‘s General Buck Turgidson was involved in this situation, he would say “the human element seems to have failed us here.”

Yes, I’m kidding. Of course it’s the technology’s fault.

The movie I’m thinking of mostly right now is George Lucas‘s THX-1138. I’m imagining the relatives of the deceased woman going to their computers to talk about their grief, and the heuristically programmed algorithmic computer saying as they log on, “What’s wrong?”

What defines a spiritual film? In my dictionary it’s any movie in which the main character is constantly communing with (i.e., pondering, meditating, wondering about) his/her inner life or more particularly that voice that seems to be talking to him/her in such a way that the main character is haunted, bothered, unsettled, off-balance and searching for the right thing to do or the right way to be.

In this sense Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed (A24, 6.22) — an absolute must-see — is a spiritual film in spades. But then so is Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote some 43 or 44 years ago. And so are a bunch of others.

I don’t want to sound like an easy lay, but I regard Field of Dreams as a spiritual film. I think The Exorcist is a spiritual film, at least as far as Damian Karras‘s character is concerned. Days of Heaven is a spiritual film; ditto The Tree of Life. Obviously Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (the screenplay for which was written by Schrader) and Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, but not — I repeat, not — Scorsese’s Kundun. (Too suffocating.) It would piss me off to hear someone call Batman Begins a spiritual film, but I suppose the argument could be made.

Is Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Little Buddha a spiritual film? I haven’t decided. Is Moby Dick a spiritual film as far as Gregory Peck‘s Captain Ahab is concerned? I’m still mulling that one over.

I got into this after reading a 3.15 Den of Geek interview with Schrader, the director-writer of First Reformed, and star Ethan Hawke. The sit-down happened last week in Austin during South by Southwest, where First Reformed (A24, 6.22) screened once or twice. It was showered with hosannahs last fall when it played the Venice and Telluride festival; it also played Toronto.

Make no mistake — First Reformed is Schrader’s best film in ages.

From my 9.1.17 rave: “I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fully felt, disciplined, well–ordered film by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says ‘Hah…I never left!'”

Life is unfair in many ways, but especially in the matter of genetic inheritance. You get what your parents give you and that’s that. If you’re lucky it’s smooth sailing, and if you’re unlucky it’s no picnic. Some, obviously, are dealt “better” or — what’s the best term? — more gracious genetic hands than others. Luck of the draw and all that.

In a comment thread under yesterday’s “Hodgepodge”, HE commenter Brenkilco said that “the Lucille Ball we all recall from I Love Lucy was already in her mid 40s.” Well, later in the 50s she was, but she’d just hit the big four-oh when the original half-hour Desilu show premiered on 10.15.51. Anyway, as Ball’s youthful beauty was the original topic, I was inspired to riff on Ball’s appearance and aging process as she got into her 40s, 50s and beyond.

(l.) Lucille Ball in the early ’40s; (r.) Jean Arthur in 1951.

Lucille Ball was born in 1911. Her bloom-of-youth years were in the 1930s and early ’40s, when she was in her 20s and early 30s. I Love Lucy began in ’51, when she’d just turned 40. She looked older, yes, but partly because she was quite the smoker and drinker, or so I’ve always understood. As Ball aged she was known for having developed one of those gravelly, sharp-edged, deep-pit voices that can only be achieved from decades of of smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Ball was 45 when the final episode of the initial I Love Lucy series aired on 5.6.57. The Luci-Desi Comedy Hour aired for roughly two and half years, between 11.6.57 and 4.1.60. Ball was 49 in the spring of ’60.

Some people hold on to their looks and keep themselves in shape into middle age, and others don’t. Most of the time it’s simply a matter of genes, sometimes it’s genes + lifestyle, and sometimes it’s genes + lifestyle + deciding against paying for touch-ups.

By the time Ball played a would-be suburban infidel in Melvin Frank and Norman Panama‘s The Facts of Life (’60) she was pushing 50 and looked it, even by the standards of the day. By 2018 standards Ball could be in her late ’50s or even her early 60s in that film. On top of which a good portion of Ball’s glamorous image was attributable to makeup, especially eye-makeup. With her fair skin, carroty complexion and less-than-aeorobicized form, she’d developed a somewhat weathered appearance.

Ball was 29 when she married the 23 year-old Desi Arnaz in November 1940.

By the same token Jean Arthur was 51 when she made Shane (it finished filming about 16 or 17 months before it opened in April ’53), and she looked a good 10 or even 15 years younger. Arthur was roughly 41 or thereabouts when she shot The Talk of the Town (’42 — directed by Shane helmer George Stevens), but she easily could’ve been 29 or 30 or 31.

Life is unfair, but it doesn’t help if you smoke like a chimney and throw down highballs on a fairly routine basis. I’m referring again to Ball…hell, to almost every mature person of that era. (Almost everyone smoked in the ’50s and ’60s.) No, I don’t know if Arthur was a smoker and drinker also…maybe she was. But if so, she had the genes to withstand the effects of tobacco and alcohol. Ball didn’t.

Jean Arthur in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings, shot when Arthur was 38 or 39.

Lucille Ball, Bob Hope in The Facts of Life.

I’ve been waiting for years to see a subtitled version of this moment from Sexy Beast (’00). I’ve watched it 20 times if I’ve watched it once, and could never figure out what Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan is saying after he says “you could make a fucking suitcase out of you.” To my ears he’s saying “ahhould-all,” which means nothing. The answer, according to the subtitles, is “holdall.” Which doesn’t mean anything either. Maybe if I was British.

Hue’s Perfume River. A friend is visiting Vietnam roughly a week from today. Also Hong Kong and Cambodia. Envious.

Lucille Ball sometime in the early to mid ’40s.

How many superheroes elbowing each other in Avengers: Infinity War…22 or 23? Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Mark Ruffalo as Hulk, Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange, Don Cheadle as War Machine, Tom Holland as Peter Parker, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther and Paul Bettany as Vision…that’s ten.

Plus Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch, Anthony Mackie as Falcon, Sebastian Stan as White Wolf, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Idris Elba as Heimdall, Benedict Wong as Wong, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Dave Bautista as Drax, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Vin Diesel as Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Chris Pratt as Peter Quill / Star-Lord…that’s thirteen or 23 total.

Plus Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Josh Brolin as bad-guy Thanos and Peter Dinklage as you-tell-me.

All of these hot-shots trying to out-quip each other. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. What’s the running time, 165 minutes? Longer?

For several decades highbrow, smarty-pants film critics have championed pulpy, seat-of-the-pants genre movies over highbrow films made with class and restraint. Raw-vitality filmmakers — Ben and Josh Safdie, Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, John Woo in the ’90s, Oxide and Danny Pang, Sonny Chiba movies, Bollywood auteurs, Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher — have always been more celebrated than highbrow types. By the elites, I mean.

Written 13 years ago by David Camp and Lawrence Levi: “The film snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, over-emotive schlock of India’s Bollywood film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Satyajit Ray, and the Spaghetti Westerns of the Sergios Leone and Sergio Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made.”

Perhaps the first time I noticed this mindset was when I read a mid ’70s piece by film critic (and my ex-re:visions partner) Stuart Byron. I forget the publication, but it compared the merits of Costa-Gavras‘s State of Siege, which opened stateside in April 1973, to Mark Lester‘s Truck-Stop Women, which opened in May of ’74. Byron preferred Lester’s film, natch. “No rig was too big for them to handle!”

Posted four years ago: Nobody remembers Richard Franklin‘s Link (’86), but it was a witty, better-than-decent genre thriller with a nice sense of tongue-in-cheek humor, and shot with a great deal of discipline. Clever, dry, smarthouse. And nobody saw it.

Shot in Scotland in ’85, Link was basically about a watchful, intelligent and increasingly dangerous chimpanzee who develops a sexual obsession for a junior zoologist played by young Elizabeth Shue (who was 22 or 23 during filming).

A Thorn EMI production that was acquired by Cannon, Link costarred Terrence Stamp, was fairly well written by Everett De Roche, and was very carefully composed. Franklin (who died young in ’07) shot it with a kind of Alfred Hitchcockian style and language. I wrote the Cannon press notes and in so doing interviewed Franklin. The then-39-year-old director worked very hard, he told me, to put Link together just so. Franklin made no secret of the fact that he was a lifelong Hitchcock devotee.

Unless you own a Region 2 Bluray/DVD player, you can’t see Link under any circumstances. You can buy a decade-old Region 2 DVD, but no NTSC version. And you can’t stream it on Amazon, Netflix or Vudu.

Boilerplate: “Jane, an American zoology student, takes a summer job at the lonely cliff-top home of a professor who is exploring the link between man and ape. Soon after her arrival he vanishes, leaving her to care for his three chimps: Voodoo, a savage female; the affectionate, child-like Imp; and Link, a circus ape trained as the perfect servant and companion.

“A disturbing role reversal takes place in the relationship between master and servant and Jane becomes a prisoner in a simian house of horror. In her attempts to escape she’s up against an adversary with several times her physical strength, and the instincts of a bloodthirsty killer.”

I helped out with Link screenings at Cannon headquarters on San Vicente Blvd., and I remember playing The Kinks “Ape Man” (a portion of which is heard in the film) as a kind of overture for invited guests.

Terrence Stamp, who starred in Link, told me during a Limey interview in ’99 that Franklin was very tough on film crews.

The Trumpian right has long regarded blue America — urban, mostly liberal, multiracial, LGBTQ, not especially religious — as a primal threat to their cherished memory of an overwhelmingly white, straight and church-attending America of yore. They consider this threat to be so fundamentally dangerous that they’re pretty much ready to let Donald Trump ignore the rule of law and, if need be, even the Democratic system to squash or stop it. They’re willing to let Trump do whatever the hell he wants, because he’s on their side and that’s all they care about.

“Having a fact-based debate in this culture is becoming almost impossible,” journalist-author Carl Bernstein said last November. “It is not just political but cultural…at all levels in our society…it’s clear to me that something is not working in America today, that the system is straining almost to the breaking point in our journalism, in our politics…partisan assertion, self interest and careerism and ideological warfare at the expense of the national interest.”

On the part of the looney-tune, Trump-supporting right, he means.

Posted on 7.4.14: “The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, proclaimed that the 13 American colonies were detaching themselves from English rule and were therefore free and independent states — quite a brave thing, raised quite a rumpus.

“The United States of America would not become relatively united and cohesive until after the end of the Civil War, of course, but for 130 years the U.S. of A. at least approximated the idea of a nation more or less bonded by shared beliefs, convictions and social goals. That’s obviously no longer true. Today and beyond the U.S. of A. is impossibly divided and never the twain shall meet. The right has gone totally around the bend. The urban Blues are the Czech Republic and the rural Reds are Slovakia, and I really think it’s time for the Czechs to sign a new Declaration of Independence and cut those bozos loose.

This morning a film-fanatic friend said his biggest hope for the ’18 Cannes Film Festival is Lars von Trier’s serial killer flick, The House That Jack Built. My immediate response was “really?” Von Trier’s weakness, I explained, “is that he feels he has to be the visionary blunt tool — a stylistically unrefined bad boy. And so he has to deliver provocative films of a certain extreme quality. And so a bad-boy movie about a serial killer…well, c’mon. You can sense what’s in store.”

The truth is that I haven’t really felt the Von Trier love since Dogville (’03) and more particularly the brilliant and shattering Dancer in the Dark (’00), which I still regard as one of the most exciting and innovative musicals of all time.

Everyone was with Von Trier in the ’90s (Breaking The Waves, The Idiots). I started to disengage with Manderlay (’05), never saw The Boss Of It All (’06), really hated Antichrist (’09), was moderately okay with Melancholia (’11), and felt mostly distanced by the “intelligent, jaggedly assembled, dispassionate wank” that was Nymphomaniac, Volume One. I called Nymphomaniac, Volume Two “a cinematic equivalent of a ‘cold spot’ in a haunted house.”

Set in the ’70s and ’80s, Von Trier’s latest follows Jack (Matt Dillon) over the course of 12 years and five increasingly risky murders. From an official synopsis: “Jack views each murder as an artwork in itself, even though his dysfunction gives him problems in the outside world.”

In February 2017 Von Trier described the film as “celebrating the idea that life is evil and soulless, which is sadly proven by the recent rise of the homo Trumpus — the rat king.”

It’s been reported that at least four of the victims are women, and will be played by Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Grabol and Riley Keough. This aspect alone is sure to reignite charges that Von Trier is some kind of compulsive misogynist, especially in this #MeToo tinderbox era. The brutal punishings suffered by his female characters over the years — Bjork‘s in Dancer in the Dark, Emily Watson‘s in Breaking The Waves, Nicole Kidman‘s in Dogville, Charlotte Gainsbourg‘s in Antichrist and Nymphomaniac — provide fuel for this hypothesis.

Nobody had much to say about my 3.15 review of Greg Berlanti‘s Love, Simon, but it opened yesterday so what’s the reaction? By any measure an antiseptic, intensely suburban gay teen romance, I described it as (a) “definitely half-decent,” (b) “smartly written” but a little “too tidy, too dream-fantasy, too TV-realm and not laid-back enough.” But at the same time not bad. I mentioned that it’s the first big-screen adaptation of a YA novel (Becky Albertalli‘s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”) that I’ve half-liked, but it still feels a little too YA-ish.

Two days ago I mentioned the “enticing” possibility of Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York playing at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. I remarked that a booking of Allen’s most recent effort “would be a way for festival topper Thierry Fremaux to not only honor a relationship with a still-important filmmaker but declare that Cannes is about cinematic art first and nervous-nelly politics second.”

This morning a friend passed along second-hand dope from a “Cannes insider”, the gist being that (a) A Rainy Day in New York “is being heavily considered,” and (b) the pulse-quickening notion of screening the Woody (which costars Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, Jude Law and Diego Luna) is currently “outweighing the ramifications of any bad press” that may result — i.e., the Robespierres chanting that a film by a director who may have molested a seven-year-old adopted daughter 25 years ago shouldn’t be so honored.

(l. to r.) Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Woody Allen during filming of A Rainy Day in New York.

Fremaux is a longtime Woody loyalist. Since joining Cannes in ’01 he’s been instrumental in booking seven Allen films — Hollywood Ending, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Midnight in Paris, Irrational Man and Cafe Society. Given this history it’s hardly surprising to hear that Fremaux “wanted to book A Rainy Day in New York before it was even shot last fall.”

Another factor favoring a Rainy Day appearance is that Fremaux also wants to play Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy (Amazon, 10.12), a drug-addiction drama costarring Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell. This plus Rainy Day would theoretically double the Chalamet press coverage…or would it?

With Chalamet having thrown Woody under the bus by announcing that he’s standing with the Robespierres as well as donating his Rainy Day salary to a #TimesUp defense fund, will he attend the Rainy Day Cannes premiere or duck out of town?