Marcel Proust‘s answers to a series of questions about personality and values were originally recorded in 1890, when Proust was 21 or thereabouts. The Wikipage says the name and popularity of the Proust questionnaire is “owed to the responses given by Proust.” Vanity Fair publishes a one-page Proust Questionnaire at the back of each issue. (Why is “n” used twice in Questionnaire?) What follows is a selective HE run-through with variations.

Your greatest source of emotional comfort?: Being with my wife when she’s in a good mood. Walking around Rome or Paris or Hanoi without purpose. A warm, not-too-crowded cafe with lightning-fast wifi in the late afternoon. The way I feel after getting nine or ten hours of sleep, which happens maybe once a month, if that. The time I spend with my cats, Anya and Yanna, as I’m waking up from a nap.

Your proudest virtues?: Diligence, doggedness when it comes to writing. A general willingness to admit fault in many (though not all) instances. Excellent taste in clothing, particularly footwear, socks, jackets and T-shirts.

Your idea of perfect happiness?: There’s no “perfect” anything. Everything ebbs and flows. Impermanence is the only thing you can count on. It follows that the only perfect happiness one can hope to embrace is to constantly wander the globe with a flush guaranteed income and the freedom to visit here and there and then move on when the mood strikes. With the option of returning to favorite locales from time to time.

Source of your greatest irritation among mixed company?: Loud, vulgar people of all shapes and manners. People who throw their heads back and shriek with laughter in bars and cafes. People who lean their seats back too far in coach.

Which living persons do you most admire?: Presently speaking I admire hundreds of people. My list would change on a daily basis, starting today with Patti Smith. I admire adventurous and quick-witted people the most. I generally admire smart, considerate people who’ve been around the block and accomplished things under pressure, especially if they have a good sense of humor.

What dead persons would you most like to meet and hang with?: Stanley Kubrick, Cary Grant, Jesus of Nazareth, John Lennon, Honore de Balzac, Carole Lombard, Julius Caesar, Jim Morrison, Abraham Lincoln, Jimi Hendrix, Howard Hawks.

Your greatest regret? Allowing my anger at my father to determine the course of my life for too many years. Not getting my life into gear sooner. Not being a better father with my younger son, Dylan. Stupidly and fearfully beating the shell of a turtle with a piece of wood when I was five or six years old (I thought it was a snapping turtle that might bite my finger off).

If you were forced to choose exile to a single country with a reasonable guaranteed income…? Italy.

The just-announced Time’s Up initiative, supported by 300 prominent industry women and currently soliciting donations, is three things at once — a legal defense fund, a push for legislation to strengthen workplace harassment laws, and a renewed effort behind the “50/50 by 2020” push to discourage sexist hiring and promotion tendencies within the studios and talent agencies.

While the Hollywood boys club ethos is being challenged as we speak, there’s a 1.1.18 Guardian piece by Rory Carroll that feels even more persuasive in this regard.

Carroll quotes Peter Mehlman, an author and Seinfeld writer, as follows:

“The completely unjustifiable confidence that normally pervades this place is really shaken. You hear a lot of dinner conversation about where the lines are and what are the nuances of inter-office socializing. The saner, more decent people are asking questions like ‘Is that it for flirting?’ The dimmer, more entitled dinosaurs are saying ‘This business isn’t even fun any more.’

“This may be the most Pollyanna thing I’ve ever said, but I really think this is going to change things. A lot. It’s hard to imagine anyone in power sizing up a woman and saying ‘I’m all over her.’ Everyone’s getting conditioned to think twice, even the most predatory among us, or maybe especially the most predatory. I may be anthropomorphising here, but I really think the animals have no choice but to be civilized.”

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson and Robert Downey, Jr. appear to be two of a kind, at least in one respect. The first thing they’ve done on the very first day of a brand new year with a sense of hope and renewal in the air…the first thing these tools have done is shovel superhero product.

While I’ve been compiling a list of 2018 films that are likely to be pretty good or perhaps even award-worthy, Mendelson is continuing his tradition of forecasting the coming blockbusters. As he well knows, the majority of these 2018 films are sure to deliver profound corporate suffocation and indigestion, and in some cases head-hammering pain. But this is who Mendelson is — he lives for the next opportunity to inject CG serum into his veins. (That said, I’m still looking very much forward to Ant-Man and the Wasp.)

Downey, a Marvel shill and paycheck whore second to none, tweeted a reminder about the coming of Avengers: Infinity War on 5.4.18. (Part one, I mean — part two pops on 5.3.19.)

I was in a moderately good mood before these guys came along.

For me, the editing of this Wolf of Wall Street YouTube clip is shattering because at the very end it truncates Jimmy Castor‘s “Hey Leroy” — it cuts right into this ineffably right 1966 tune right when the song is lifting Wolf into a groove-and-soothe mode. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s inspirational howling-alpha-male speech is the brick and mortar, and “Hey, LeRoy” is the combination quaalude and back-rub that follows. “Selling Steve Madden” is easily one the greatest scenes in the canon of 21st Century art-cinema. Historians will study it a thousand years hence, but will they get where Martin Scorsese was really coming from?

In all modesty, the Get Out bandwagon was stopped in its tracks yesterday afternoon by a bold Hollywood Elsewhere one-two punch — “Twitter Mafiosos & Their Herd-Mentality Games” and “Get Out & Invasion of Brain Snatchers,” posted within three or four hours of each other.

And the two best reader comments fell under the “Brain Snatchers” piece, to wit:

(1) “I’m not sure exactly what the idiots are thinking when they use [the term ‘woke’], but the definition that seems closest to the mark is ‘woke’ = ‘white liberal who has outsourced his/her/its/their thinking to non-white liberals-in-name-only in a desperate bid for Cool Kid points.” — “Zerowing”

(2) “If [Get Out] wins Best Picture, it will cement the fact that the Oscars, especially for Best Picture, is a total crap shoot, and a political-social awareness merit badge award, and consequentially the Oscar will soon be regarded as flatly meaningless by an even larger swath of society and industry.” — “Brad“

Sterling Hayden, a Wiltonian whom I came to know in the late ’70s, was a fascinating, hungry, obviously vulnerable fellow, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways.

And his legendary interviews with Tom Snyder around this late Carter period (when Hayden was 63 or 64) conveyed this. Watch this ten-minute clip and try to resist him — you can’t. So charmingly unsettled, so spirited and twitchy, speaking in his own special idiosyncratic shorthand. He really knew how to tell a story his way.

There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that.

We all define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.

Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.

Nothing happens until the 5:21 mark — just push the bar forward. This is the thing about New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles — it’s nearly the last major city on the globe to celebrate. When the L.A. clock strikes twelve, Muscovites and even Parisians will be having brunch the following morning.

I own a UHD 4K version of The Guns of Navarone. I bought it from Amazon sometime last year, for around $20 bills. Last week Amazon removed it from my library. I’m sure there’s a sensible motive behind this, but I couldn’t care less. You don’t sell somebody something and then say “sorry, we’re taking it back.” That falls under the heading of disreputable business practices.

I was just reading a 12.20 N.Y. Times profile of Elizabeth Banks, written and reported by former “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik. It explains how Banks, a once-frustrated actress, has become a multi-hyphenate — director (Pitch Perfect 2), production company chief, benefactor of female comedians and actress with her hand still very much in. But there’s a mistaken quote in the piece.

“When [Banks] arrived in Los Angeles, equipped with drama training from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, she had clear goals,” Ryzik writes. “‘I came to be Julia Roberts,’ she said. ‘And they stopped making rom-coms the minute that I got here. I have literally fallen in love exactly one time in a movie.”

Banks was referring to a dud comedy called Walk of Shame (’14). However, she did fall in love “in a movie” that very same year, and with Brian Wilson, no less. The film was called Love and Mercy, of course, and Banks gave her best performance in it, bar none.

Elizabeth Banks

I did a 48-minute chat earlier today with critic Jordan Ruimy (The Playlist, The Film Stage, We Got This Covered, The Young Folks, World of Reel). If you ask me the most interesting portion happens during the first eight or nine minutes, when we mainly discussed the “woke” support for Jordan Peele‘s Get Out. Again, the mp3. Here are selected transcriptions:

Wells: “This is a movie that traffics in social satire and horror, and basically says there’s a quietly malicious attitude that elite whites have toward people of color, and that they’re trying to turn them into zombies and make them into the kind of people they want…this is a weird metaphor because the same people who are loving Get Out are the people who are depicted in the film, the same malicious whites who are trying to manipulate people of color. The liberals with money and taste and who would’ve voted for Barack Obama a third time…these are the bad guys in the film and it’s this crowd…this liberal crowd is pushing Get Out the most.”

Critic Jordan Ruimy (The Playlist, The Film Stage, We Got This Covered, The Young Folks, World of Reel).

Ruimy: “We’re living in a very interesting time right now in film criticism. Back in the ’90s, even ten years ago it was such a different spectrum…and now political theory [has] snuck in, and any film you watch now you have to judge it politically, and that’s the way it’s going right now. And it’s very infuriating. Even though art should be political in a way. If Get Out had come out ten years ago, we would have totally forgotten it by the end of the year. We wouldn’t have even remembered it. That’s what’s really maddening about this whole thing.

“Do I think Get Out is a good movie? Yeah, I do. As I said I had one hell of a time watching it with a big crowd [at the AMC Boston Common plex]. But to go back to this criticstop10 site which has compiled over 388 critics list, and Get Out made 276 lists in the top ten. It’s also topped the most lists — 46 lists have it at #1. Most of the people who really rave about the movie are the Millenials. They always connect it to the woke movement and to the current political climate. If this were ’01 or ’02, and there was no woke movement, no critical theory…”