The only way to endure a window seat on a long coast-to-coast flight is to submit to a kind of meditation. You have to slip into a Zen hibernation state. You have shut off those parts of yourself that want to get up and stretch or cross your legs or anything in that realm. You have to focus on writing and reading, and if you do a really deep drill that awful sense of suffocation and imprisonment will slowly go away.

For me watching mediocre films — 95% of the movie menu on this fight is pure fizz — seems to make the flight go more slowly.

Thank God there are only 90 minutes left, give or take. Right now we’re passing over western Colorado. Estimated LAX touchdown around 1:55 pm or so. Add another 30 to 40 minutes for runway taxi time plus the always interminable fuselage disembarking plus the luggage carousel.

2 pm update: Touched down five minutes ago.

A Bluray of David Mamet‘s The Spanish Prisoner pops on 1.8.19; Amazon Prime members can stream it right now.

My recollections are a little fuzzy. Critics generally liked it. Mostly I remember the novelty of Steve Martin playing a smooth-talking bad guy. I recall that the first third or even the first half are highly intriguing, and then it kind of runs out of gas during the second half. I racked my brain but couldn’t recall any specific problems — just a vague sense of attrition. I know it always means something when you can’t recall much in the way of plot specifics, much less how a film ends.

So I read the fairly detailed Wikipedia synopsis and it still didn’t come back to me. So I’ve decided to watch it again. Tomorrow or the next day, I mean. Right now I’m stuck on a hellish, soul-suffocating N.Y.-to-L.A. flight, and of course the wifi isn’t strong enough to stream movies with. (It’s so shitty that I can’t even upload an image to the right folder on my server.)

The Spanish Prisoner is a dry, rather droll white-collar con movie. Everyone in the cast is a smooth villain (Martin, Ben Gazzara, Rebecca Pidgeon, the late Ricky Jay, Felicity Huffman). Campbell Scott, the creator of some kind of valuable financial “process” (blah McGuffin), is the increasingly frazzled mark.

This opens up something new for HE list queens — films that drop the ball during their second halves or third acts but are terrifically entertaining during their first 33% to 50%. Some of these films are so great during their first halves that I don’t even mind that they fumble it later on.

I love this Roger Ebert observation: “[Mamet’s] characters often speak as if they’re wary of the world, afraid of being misquoted, reluctant to say what’s on their minds: As a protective shield, they fall into precise legalisms, invoking old sayings as if they’re magic charms.”

..that I’m about to endure a six and a half hour Alaskan Airlines fight from Newark to Los Angeles. Every seat occupied, tight fit, possible filing during flight if I’m willing to pay astronnomical connection fee, etc. 2:30 pm arrival.

Wiki synopsis for Bryan Bertino‘s The Strangers (2008), which costarred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman: “Kristen (Tyler) and James (Speedman) are expecting a relaxing weekend at a family vacation home, but their stay turns out to be anything but peaceful as three masked intruders leave Kristen and James struggling for survival.”

You have to figure that today’s seven-year-olds are probably more hip to the Santa Claus fraud than their 20th Century counterparts. I was tipped off when I seven or eight. More likely seven. A friend from across the street woke me. It was probably my first encounter with serious emotional betrayal, and at the hand of my parents yet! The feeling stuck, and one result was my inability to pass along the Santa myth to own kids with any conviction. I think I might have actually told them that Santa is more of a symbol of love and generosity than anything else.

Question: Melania needs a cue card to speak with kids about Christmas?

Last night I re-sampled Roma on Netflix. My fourth viewing. The black-and-white compositions have always looked great on theatrical screens, but they look even better on my Sony 930C 65″ 4K HDR, especially via the new Samsung 4K Bluray player. I could live in that film, that eye spa. The only film that offers a similar monochrome wonderland vibe is Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War.

But I’m of two minds about some forthcoming 70mm presentations that Netflix has planned. On one hand I’d like to see what it looks like; on the other I know it can’t look as good as it does at home or via digital projection.

I’m slightly puzzled by a quote from Roma director Alfonso Cuaron in a 12.20 Variety piece by Dave McNary, to wit: “Roma is designed to be meaningful whether experienced at home or on the big screen but offering cinema lovers the opportunity to see it in theaters is incredibly important to me. The 70mm print of Roma shows unique details not available on any other version. Being shot in 65mm, these prints bring live detail and contrast only possible using a big format film. It is for sure the most organic way to experience Roma.”

I heard this morning from a tech-savvy friend who disagrees with Cuaron:

“The foundation of Roma is the beautiful, shimmering, nitrate-like black-and-white imagery,” he said. “I wonder if it was captured in color and affected in post?

“The strange thing is the announcement that they’re making some 70mm prints to have an ‘organic’ look, whatever that is. The publicity mentions a large-format 65mm negative, but Roma was shot as data.

“65mm digital, straight from the chip, blows projected 70mm celluloid out of the ballpark. If you go from original finalized data to a recorded negative, and then to a print and then project it, and projection is almost always flawed unless you’re screening it in the Academy or some other first-rate venue…if you do all that you’ve lost probably 25% of the image quality. Not to mention trying to achieve the purity of the black-and-white data on color stock.

“So why project it on 70mm film?”

I’ve asked Cuaron about these disparate views, and whether my tech-savvy friend might be missing something. Haven’t heard back.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome to Marwen, which suffered an embarassing wipeout last weekend, will lose between $45 and $50 million when all is said and done.

There are three reasons, I suspect, why Marwen died so quickly and decisively. One, who wants to see a movie about a place or an entity or a state of mind called Marwen, which sounds like some nowhere burgh off the New Jersey Turnpike? Two, people could smell the oversaturation of twee. And three, moviegoers are sick of Steve Carell‘s mopey and mournful performances — The Big Short (mopey investor Mark Baum), Last Flag Flying (mopey dad mourning his dead son) and especially Beautiful Boy (mopey dad trying to save his son from drug addiction).

Two or three days ago some Berniebots went after Beto O’Rourke’s partly centrist, somewhat politically incorrect voting record in the House of Representatives over the last four or five years. Ardent supporters of Bernie Sanders are claiming, in other words, that O’Rourke isn’t progressive enough and has been too accommodating to Republican and corporate interests.

The most thorough and agenda-free answer to this, it seems to me, was posted yesterday on Twitter by NBC political reporter Jonathan Allen. He reviewed 167 votes in which O’Rourke went against the majority of Democrats, and found that he’s a reasonably forward-looking moderate-mixed lefty.

Allen: “A fair reading of the votes is that [O’Rourke] isn’t always aligned with the most progressive set in the Democratic Caucus but that he usually is — and that he doesn’t like dilatory votes.”

“Does this mean he’s ‘progressive’ or ‘progressive enough’?”,” Allen concluded. “Not for me to decide. Certainly, each vote will get its vet.

“But it’s fascinating that the first shots of the invisible 2020 Democratic primary are Bernie backers targeting O’Rourke. A fair reading of the politics is that Sanders backers are worried about his pull with progressives and millennials — and that is framed by portraying O’Rourke as a tool of the old Democratic establishment. This fight is just starting, and it will be interesting to watch. It’s easy to dismiss reporting on it as ‘horserace’ journalism, but the way the candidates, their campaigns and their supporters engage in politics is a big part of how campaigns are won and lost.”

I’m a fairly robust and energetic type, but recovering from surgery over the past three weeks has reminded me that you can’t shrug off biological vulnerability. We’re not made of hard plastic, steel and titanium, and it hurts when a scalpel slices into your skin and digs into your muscles, tendons, fatty tissue and bones. It takes weeks to really feel like yourself again, and you can get easily accustomed to popping pain pills — trust me.

And I went through one of the least traumatic surgeries imaginable — a skin-removal (and then skin graft) operation by first-rate professionals. I’m imagining how it would have felt if I’d been seriously clubbed or shot or stabbed, and then have to recover without decent medical care. Or if I’d been Ethan Hunt in last summer’s Mission: Impossible: Fallout, tear-assing around Paris on a BMW motorcycle and slammed by a speeding car. Or if I’d suffered any of the other ridiculous body traumas that action heroes endure as a matter of routine these days.

Nothing hurts, nobody gets wounded, nobody limps around…every punch or bullet wound or head blow is taped up and shrugged off. Because action filmmakers aren’t interested in wounds or stitches or vulnerability. Which is one more reason why I hate most action flicks today (apart from the fact that they don’t respect physics in the least) and almost all superhero films. And it wasn’t always this way.

There’s a scene in Mike Hodges‘ Get Carter in which a friend of Michael Caine‘s titular character has been beaten up pretty badly, and is all bandaged and bruised and even moaning from the pain. You’re not likely to see anything like that these days.

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It was around ’84, maybe ’85. I was platonically friendly with Kathryn, a whipsmart production executive with a good heart who suffered no fools. She was sharing a sizable home in Topanga Canyon with a couple of others, and every so often would invite friends over on the weekend. I attended a couple of these schmoozers. Filmmakers, publicists, producers, writers, production veterans…most in their late 20s to late 30s.

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