Sometime in mid-July of ’99, or 18 and 1/2 years ago, I suffered through an all-media screening of Jan DeBont‘s The Haunting. I went with the hope that DeBont, whose stock had plummeted two years earlier after the catastrophe of Speed 2: Cruise Control, might rebound if he would only pay tribute to Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’63) by relying on eerie suggestion rather practical and CG effects. Alas, he ignored Wise’s approach entirely.

“The Haunting isn’t merely bad,” I wrote in my Mr. Showbiz column. “It’s one of the emptiest, most ineptly plotted, synthetically programmed, pointlessly overdone summer movies I’ve ever seen. I’m now completely convinced that this is the movie that drove Liam Neeson to the brink of retirement. The film’s final close-up is of Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones wearing looks of utter exhaustion with a hint of self-loathing, and you have to figure that gearing themselves up emotionally for this shot couldn’t have been much of a stretch.”

The Haunting wasn’t a financial wipeout — it cost $80 million to make, earned $91.4 million domestically and $177 million worldwide. But it was so grueling to sit through…well, I don’t know that The Haunting was the reason behind DeDont not landing another directing gig until three years had elapsed — Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (’03). But it sure didn’t help.

This ScreenPrism essay about the films of Stanley Kubrick is only six days old — it was posted on 2.18. Boiled down it basically says that Kubrick’s films all say the same thing, which is that humans are ignoble, disruptive and untrustworthy creatures consumed by self-denial and various foolish mythologies and delusions, but that the visual framings used by Kubrick to tell variations of this same sad story can be deeply lulling and at the same time transporting. Similarly, this essay is so soothing on a certain level that it will engage your mind and especially your memory while at the same time putting you into a kind of trance. I stopped listening to the young woman’s narration after two or three minutes, and yet I continued to absorb what she was saying by a kind of osmosis, by sinking into the clips like some kind of heated pool or bathtub. An amazing process.

Barry Levinson‘s Horsing Around In The Shower is based on a script by Debora Cahn, John C. Richards and David McKenna. It seems to primarily be a journalism saga, pitting the late Joe Paterno (Al Pacino), Penn State’s legendary football coach who disgraced himself by looking the other way while Jerry Sandusky (Jim Johnson) did what he did with God-knows-how-many young guys, against real-life Patriot News reporter Sarah Ganim (Riley Keough), who’s now working for CNN.

To go by the trailer Joe’s wife Sue (Kathy Baker) looked the other way also. HBO will debut the 102-minute film, which is actually called Paterno, on 4.7.

Again — you have to see Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley (’14) before watching the Levinson version.

“No self-respecting cinefile approves of colorizing black-and-white movies,” I wrote on 10.28.17, “but colorizing monochrome stills can be a respectable thing if done well.”

The Humphrey Bogart-Lauren BacallBig Sleep still below is probably the best colorized b&w image from a Hollywood film mine eyes have ever beheld — ditto the Bogart-and-Ingrid BergmanCasablanca shot below it. I’m aware that monochrome films of the ’30s and ’40s were shaded and lighted to deliver maximum impact in terms of a certain silvery compositional aura, but these really look good.

Okay, not so much the Bogart-and-Martha Vickers shot from The Big Sleep, but even that isn’t too bad.

Ditto: “Remember how colorized images used to look in the bad old days? I don’t know if it’s a matter of someone having come up with a better color-tinting software or someone’s willingness to take the time to apply colors in just the right way, but every so often a fake-color photo can look really good. Incidentally: I approve of carefully tinted black-and-white newsreel footage.”

More than a little dodging and sidestepping went into the Annihilation aggregate critic ratings — 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, 80% on Metacritic. Critics are always afraid of appearing unhip or clueless — even if a movie confounds or irritates or pisses them off, it’s safer to convey knowing approval or respect for what it seems to be attempting. Presumably a good portion of the HE community saw it last night and has seen through the bullshit. And if some “liked’ it, I know they’re also bothered by it. Please share whatever reactions you may be struggling with.

I was reminded this morning of what a brilliant scary-movie director Andy Muschietti used to be. A little less than six years ago, I mean, when he was directing Mama in Toronto with producer Guillermo del Toro by his side. I’m speaking of a classic Mama bit that belongs in the annals of classic high-craft horror. The film is worth seeing for this alone.

From my January 2013 Mama review (“Battle of the Mommies“): “It involves an older sister stealing her younger sister’s blanket, and then a static hallway shot showing the two of them wrestling for control of the blanket in their bedroom but with only the younger sister visible. And then we see something unexpected. I laughed out loud. I mostly hate the geek realm, but for that moment I was in geek fucking heaven.

“Mama is a light-touch horror pic. A concoction that sneaks in with hints and teasing cuts and, okay, an occasional shock cut or shock-music prompt, but mainly little cinematic games that turn you on if you’re attuned, and if not you’ll just sit there like a popcorn-munching wildebeest and going ‘okay, okay but…c’mon, dude, where’s the really crazy shit? Where are the blood-soaked carpets?”]’

“All I know is that Mama is made for guys like myself. It’s not in the least bit gross or revolting, and it’s seriously, fundamentally scary.

“It’s also one hell of a calling card for first-time-director Muschietti as it feels like it was directed by a middle-aged pro. That’s a nod to Del Toro as he developed Mama, finessed it, worked on every aspect (it was shot in Toronto around the time of principal photography of Pacific Rim), and perhaps held Muschietti’s hand the way Howard Hawks held Christian Nyby‘s during the making of The Thing. It’s just that Mama feels so smooth and commanding and sure of itself.”

That was then, this is now.

Jessica Chastain recently explained her interest in wanting to work with Muschietti on an IT sequel, in which she’ll play a grown-up Beverly Marsh:

“Well, I love Andy and [his sister/producer] Barbara Muschietti,” she told Screenrant‘s Padraig Cotter. “I worked with them on Andy’s directorial debut, Mama. So we’ll see. They’re friends, they’re family. Anything that they’re doing I want to be a part of, so I hope we can make it happen.”

Except IT wasn’t nearly as creepy as Mama. IT actually made it clear, if you ask me, that the Muschietti who’d made Mama, a fellow who seemed to believe in the less-is-more Val Lewton approach, had been replaced by a studio-kowtowing hack.

Doesn’t the fact that Judd Apatow‘s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO, 3.26 and 3.27) runs four and a half hours…shouldn’t that fact alone warrant special interest among Shandling fans, of which there are still many? I loved Garry’s angst, his depressive personality, his low self-esteem…I’m talking worship here. But I have to say I liked Shandling in his 40s and 50s better than the older version. His hair, for instance. Shandling had great wavy follicles in the ’90s but was down to a tennis-ball cut after Obama got elected. And his eyes got smaller — they were big and expressive in his 40s but slitty and beady in his 60s. And I don’t know about that Zen thing he got into, and I’m saying this as a former Bhagavad Gita guy. Garry once wrote “you don’t need to be anything, you can just be.” The only people who say or think that are filthy rich or completely devoted to abstinence and poverty, and Shandling wasn’t among the latter. The poor guy died of a heart attack on 3.24.16, at age 66. If there’s anything beyond death, Garry is surely part of it now, dispersed into a trillion particles of consciousness or possibly transformed into a perfect smile.

Hold on, let me get this straight. The same woman who called the FBI on 1.5.18 and told them chapter-and-verse about Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, that he’d bought several weapons with his late mother’s insurance payout and that he’s stupid and has murdered and cut up some animals and that he might be “getting into a school and just shooting the place up” because she knew “he’s going to explode”…that same woman also called the Broward County sheriff’s office, and neither the Broward guys nor the FBI did a damn thing about this, and as a result 17 people inside Stoneman Douglas High School (mostly students) were slaughtered by Cruz on 2.14, or roughly five weeks later?

Here’s a transcript of the call to the FBI.

This is completely insane — the FBI was told exactly what would happen and exactly who the bad guy was, and they didn’t do jack squat.

The best love stories are about relationships that don’t work out. Which is what Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Bleecker, Street, 5.18), an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s same-titled 2007 novel, is basically about. Set in early ’60s Weymouth, Saoirse Ronan plays Florence, an independent-minded lass who develops reservations about getting married to Edward (Billy Howle) and particularly about the confined, straight-laced life she’ll be expected to lead. And then it all falls apart over sexual anxiety.

I saw On Chesil Beachduring last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I somehow knew it wouldn’t be much even before I sat down. I could feel the minor-ness. The problem, for me, was that it was more about pre-marital misgivings than anything else, and I just didn’t give a damn whether Ronan and Howle “did it” or not, or whether or not they wanted to get married or anything. I couldn’t have cared less.

Honestly? I cared so little about their doomed relationship that I left around the 75-minute mark, and quickly decided I wouldn’t write about it because I’d missed the last half-hour or whatever. Now I’m breaking my promise because the trailer has dropped.

Who wants to see a movie with that title anyway? It’s like calling a movie On Swizzle Stick. I wasn’t even sure how to say “Chesil” when I first saw it on the page — I think it’s pronounced chezzle. (The actual Chesil Beach is located southwest of Weymouth, which is part of Dorset County in southwestern England.) It sounds like a shitty little beach with a lot of rocks and pebbles that will hurt your bare feet if you take a stroll, and who wants to go through that?

Rita Moreno‘s Anita in West Side Story was a great, full-spirited spitfire performance, but let’s be honest — she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar on the coattails of a massive West Side Story sweep. The 1961 musical won 10 Academy Awards that night, but even its biggest fans were surprised when George Chakiris‘s Bernardo defeated George C. Scott‘s rattlesnake gambler in The Hustler. Nonetheless Moreno was the first Puerto Rican…hell, Latina actress to win such a prize, and that was no small historic thing. But Moreno (who was still involved in her eight-year-long affair with Marlon Brando at the time) was so blown away that she didn’t say anything at the podium — no thanks to director-producer Robert Wise, no shout-out to fellow cast members or other Latina actresses, nothing.

Very few remember and even fewer have seen Separate Tables, the 1958 parlor drama with Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Wendy Hiller. And yet this constipated, dialogue-driven film, directed by Delbert Mann (Marty) and based on a pair of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, was nominated for seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Kerr), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Black and White), and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score) and won two (Niven for Best Actor, Hiller for Best Supporting Actress).

Separate Tables is exactly the kind of solemn, stiff-necked talkfest that was often regarded as Oscar bait in the mid-to-late ’50s. Decorum and public appearances undermined by dark secrets and notions of perverse sexuality, etc. Shudder! Erections and dampenings that dare not speak their name, or words to that effect.

Talk about “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” etc. Two years before Separate Tables appeared a creepy, low-budget sci-fi thriller called Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened and was promptly ignored by the highbrows. Four years earlier (in ’54) The Creature From The Black Lagoon was greeted with similar indifference if not disdain. Today a pair of direct descendants, Get Out and The Shape of Water, are Best Picture nominees, and there’s a better-than-even (though admittedly dwindling) chance that Shape will take the Big Prize.

Yesterday I received a hilarious, spot-on essay by the great David Thomson — about Separate Tables initially, but also about how the appeal and some of the “Academy inflation” of this 60-year-old film are echoed in I, Tonya and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Consider this excerpt especially: “About fifteen minutes into I Tonya, on being bowled over by the vicious hangdog look of Allison Janney’s mother, the toxic lines slipping like smoke from the fag on her lips, I was ready to give her the supporting actress Oscar on the spot. Twenty minutes later I was bored with her because she was still doing the same bitter schtick. She’s an act, a show-stopper, the sort of hag who would get a round of applause as she appears on-stage, severing any prospect of dramatic truth.

“It’s not that Janney is less than skilled, or hasn’t paid her dues for decades. She’s a clever old pro so give her the Oscar. But let’s abandon the myth that she is presenting a real ‘deplorable’ instead of saying, ‘Aren’t deplorables a riot?'”

Here’s the whole brilliant piece (the first 17 paragraphs about Separate Tables, and the rest about Janney and Margot Robbie in I, Tonya and McDormand in Three Billboards):

“I found myself watching Separate Tables on Turner Classic Movies. There it was, offered with the seemingly unassailable claim that it had been nominated for Best Picture in 1958 along with six other nominations. It even had two wins, and I remembered that one of them was for David Niven playing a bogus Major. I had seen the film in 1958 and flinched at it even then (the bogus business was all fusspot), in a year that included Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Bonjour Tristesse, Man of the West, The Tarnished Angels and many others that still seem of value.

Late yesterday afternoon the Academy announced that scuttlebutt to the contrary, Sufjan Stevens will perform “Mystery of Love” on the March 4th Oscar telecast.

Hollywood Elsewhere has a notion that the Call Me By Your Name guys were just as surprised and elated as I was by this decision. Direct quote from director Luca Guadagnino from his home in Crema, received at 8:28 am Pacific: “FANTASTIC!”

It was pure coincidence that producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd announced this hours after yesterday’s HE rant about rumors (which were first aired by Gold Derby‘s Chris Beacham) that Stevens might be eliminated from the show. And the announcement was not a reversal of an earlier indicated position when DeLuca and Todd didn’t ask Stevens to perform when they first invited him to attend the show. (In a 2.3.18 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael O’Connell, Stevens said that he might not perform “Mystery of Love” during the ceremony since “they’ve only asked if I’m going to attend.”)

No, seriously — I think the Academy did respond to pressure from some quarter. Maybe the Sony Classics guys called up and said “Yo, what da fock?”