From 3.12 Guardian review by Monica Castillo: “While the movie is visually whimsical with its design and neon colors, the weakness of the source material still pokes out. Plot holes remain, despite screenwriter Zak Penn and Spielberg’s efforts to liven up the visuals and punch up the dialogue. I’m not sure I have a great understanding of how the game mechanics are supposed to work. If movement is required to move an avatar in the game, how do people play in the Oasis while standing in their living rooms?”

Last weekend Selma Blair was quoted by Metro‘s Katie Bailey saying that Cameron Diaz, who hasn’t made a film since Will Gluck‘s Annie (’14) and whose last good film was Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (’13), has more or less bailed on her film career.

“I had lunch with Cameron the other day,” Blair reportedly said. “We were reminiscing about [The Sweetest Thing]. I would have liked to do a sequel but Cameron’s retired from acting. She’s like ‘I’m done.'” Blair was presumedly screamed at that night by Diaz and her reps, and so she tweeted the following day (Monday, 3.12) that Diaz “is NOT retiring from ANYTHING.”

Today, or four days after Bailey’s Metro story, People‘s Mike Miller posted a story about how the 45 year-old Diaz “is loving her life outside the Hollywood spotlight.” Quoting “a source”, Miller writes that Diaz and her 39 year-old, tattoo-covered musician husband Beji Madden are “great” and “both very happy living the quiet life.”

Translation: Diaz’s career is in eclipse but she doesn’t want anyone thinking she’s not ready to return if the right part comes along.

Diaz’s career started to lose steam as she got older and her looks started to fade. You can’t say she didn’t appear in better films during the ’90s and early aughts. We all know that actresses often have a rougher time when they start to show mileage. Or something like that. I didn’t invent the system. I deplore it. But that’s how it goes in some cases.

The same thing happened with Brendan Fraser — career peak between ’92 and ’05, and then he began to age out.

If you ask me Diaz peaked from ’94 to ’05, or from age 22 to 33 — from her breakout debut in Chuck Russell‘s The Mask (’94) to Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, in which she gave her career-best performance.

Yesterday Variety‘s Peter Debruge and Elsa Keslassy spitballed about possible 2018 Cannes Film Festival selections — Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale, Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows (in Spanish) and Olivier Assayas‘ E-Book.

Not to mention Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro, Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, Terrence Malick’s Radegund (in German), Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman, Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.

It’s worth noting that Debruge and Keslassy, mindful of antsy industry currents, didn’t mention an especially enticing possibility — Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York, which will probably be dumped by Amazon (those antsy currents!) but which would be a major score for this world-class Cote d’Azur festival.

Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez in Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York.

Woody’s films have played Cannes three or four times in the recent past, and a booking of his most recent effort, which partly deals with an inappropriate-age-gap relationship between Jude Law and Elle Fanning, 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.

Because you just know that a certain sector of American journalists will freak out if and when the Woody is chosen. Does Fremaux have the balls? Will Allen have the sand to face the Cannes press corps?

Debruge and Keslassy also suggest in their piece that Cannes should adhere to a gender quota system. “From the international success of Wonder Woman to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, the world is a much different place than it was in May 2017,” they remind. “Will Cannes delegate general Thierry Fremaux get with the program and include more female directors?”

I would imagine that Fremaux would indeed want to increase the presence of female directors this year, but HE’s Jordan Ruimy has a response to Debruge and Keslassy that I agree with 110%:

“Cannes is not a quota festival. It recognizes excellence in cinema. If a smaller number of female directors fail to produce excellent movies in a given year, that fault is on those directors, not Cannes. Lowering the bar to meet some dumb quota hurts women, not helps them. Festivals are supposed to be merit-based, and Cannes most of all in this regard.”

Greg Berlanti‘s Love, Simon (20th Century Fox, 3.16) is definitely half-decent — an antiseptic, intensely suburban gay teen romance that’s also about coming out. It’s the first big-screen adaptation of a YA novel (Becky Albertalli‘s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”) that I’ve actually half-liked, and it is kind of a big cultural deal that Fox is releasing a gentle, emotionally pliant, same-sex love story in 2400 theatres.**

Love, Simon is smartly written (the screenplay authors are This Is Us showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger) and straight-friendly, but — here come the caveats — it feels like a professional sell-job. Like an advertisement for the way things ought to be in Young Gay Utopia. It feels too tidy, too TV-realm, too “produced” and not, you know, laid-back enough. (Like Call Me By Your Name, say — a totally settled, unforced vibe flick from start to finish.)

But Simon‘s heart and head are in the right places, and it’s a whole lot better than Kelly Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen, which struck me as vaguely similar and which I hated with a passion when I saw it a couple of years ago.

Amiable, mild-mannered Simon (Nick Robinson) is a closeted high school senior living with his parents (Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner) and younger sister (Talitha Bateman) in a well-tended Atlanta suburb. But the realm is essentially a blend of Disney World and a 21st Century update of John Hughes Land — an affluent, multi-cultural, progressive-minded hamlet where almost everyone (except for one appalling sociopath, played by Logan Miller, who causes all the trouble) is cool about everything.

Although his parents and friends are fair-minded and accepting of whatever, Simon has decided to wait until college to announce that he’s gay. But then he falls into this anonymous online chat with another gay guy — a local kid who calls himself Blue. The movie is partly about guessing who Blue might be. It’s also about Miller’s batshit-insane character, Martin, who discovers Simon’s flirtation with Blue and uses this knowledge to blackmail him into helping him get together with one of Simon’s close friends (i.e., a girl). I was saying to myself “if this was Goodfellas Martin would get an ice pick in the back of the neck.”

Simon suspects (and we are led to presume) that Blue might be one of three guys — all good looking, one of a POC persuasion and the other two Caucasian, one dark-haired and one semi-blonde. They all seem like good candidates, but I was a bit disappointed when the real Blue was revealed. (Not my choice.) Simon, however, is ready to roll with all of these guys.

Want a better, less conventional ending? Simon is really attracted to A, vaguely attracted to B and not that attracted to C, and then Blue turns out to be C. And Simon says, “Aaah…okay…life is unfair. But it’s nice to know ya, brah. I like what you have to say.” And they become good friends.

I’m sorry but I’m two…actually make that three guys.

One, the cautious, considerate, even-steven, take-it-as-it-comes guy that I mostly am (or try to be) in a socially mixed context. Two, the guy I am at home when I’m not wearing my public mask, dealing with fatigue, frustrations, traffic, scrambled eggs, cats, fears, dry cleaning, the shoe guy, anxieties and plants as well as occasional moments of calm, comfort and serenity. And three, the guy who emerges when I’m writing the column.

The first and third guys rarely overlap, although sometimes they do. The second guy is on speaking terms with the first and third but he feels more kinship with the first. But the third guy…well, there wouldn’t be any Hollywood Elsewhere without him, so I need to let him do the dance, so to speak, as well as show a certain amount of deference and respect.

The dialogue in this scene is extremely dry and referenced. Deftly written, not a single lowball moment, and aimed at a sophisticated audience that will presumably pick up on the flicking pop-culture references. Lasting three minutes and 49 seconds, it delivers all kinds of concurrent moods and attitudes — sexual, hostile, aloof, indifferent, observant, dismissive — right on the money. “Give him whatever it is they drink…is a Coke around?…you don’t have to do all the old adenoidal glottal stuff and carry on for our benefit.”

I ducked out of last night’s Tomb Raider press screening around 7:55 pm or thereabouts. On my way out I noticed a lively crowd congregated in the Arclight lobby. I quickly learned it was a premiere screening for Max Winkler‘s Flower (The Orchard, 3.16). I never got invited to a screening, but it’s not like Flower was hotly buzzed about when it played the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival or, you know, is currently setting Twitter ablaze.

Given the reviews it got last spring from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Scheck, Slant‘s Chuck Bowen and TheWrap‘s Dan Callahan, the publicists appear to be relying on the old hide-the-ball strategy.

“There’s nary a believable moment in Winkler’s edgy dark comedy about a rebellious teen girl (Zoey Deutch) who’s clearly meant to be amusingly crass but instead comes across as emotionally disturbed,” Scheck wrote. “Uneasily combining its determinedly edgy plotline with failed sentimentality, Flower is redeemed only by Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance, which would be star-making if in the service of a better vehicle. The film also squanders the talents of such reliable comic pros as Kathryn Hahn and Adam Scott.”

The “edgy” plot is basically about Deutch’s Erica giving blowjobs to older guys in order to blackmail them for inappropriate sexual contact, and then deciding to nail an older guy named Will (Scott) for having allegedly molested Luke (Joey Morgan), the overweight, oxy-addicted son of her mom’s boyfriend.

Two thoughts about the trailer: (a) Deutch, who delivered a likable, easy-vibe lead performance in Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some!! (’16), has, as Erica, a brashly assertive Millenial screwball quality — you can tell right away that she’s “got it” as far as that term applies; and (b) why is Morgan, the red-haired, whale-sized guy whose sexual victimhood is the whole reason for the revenge plot…why doesn’t the trailer show Morgan saying a line or two?

Tomb Raider (Warner Bros., 3.16) is a third-rate, totally-by-the-numbers, CG-propelled exercise in female adventurer myth-building.

With the exception of Alicia Vikander‘s defiantly emotional performance as Lara Croft, which is surprisingly decent considering the circumstances, this cinematic effort by the great Roar Uthaug (pronounce his last name over and over until you can say it backwards in your sleep) struck me as a mostly boring, time-wasting programmer — a 21st century equivalent of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.

Don’t let this and the other cruddy reviews stop you this weekend. You wanna see how Vikander measures up, right?

The truth is that this Swedish-born Oscar winner, all of 29, isn’t half bad as the video-game adventurer with the bow-and-arrow and the buff bod. She’s too small (5’5″) to be a convincing whup-asser and I could have done with fewer cries of pain, but she gives this gamer character everything she has inside, trying like hell to make Croft’s situation feel as earnest and real-deal as possible. Vikander certainly gives a more full-hearted performance than Angelina Jolie did in those two Lara Croft flicks (’01 and ’03) that came and went without stirring a single bowl of soup. And comparing VK’s boobs to Jolie’s is a non-issue.

The first 35 minutes of Tomb Raider are the most plausible and therefore tolerable, as they happen in a semblance of real-world London (Croft’s home) and Hong Kong, and then aboard a small ship bound for a remote location in the South China Sea.

Croft is a reluctant heiress. Yeah, I know — what kind of idiot says “nahh, I don’t want an inheritance — I’d rather be in debt as I deliver pizza on a bicycle”? She’s torn up about her disappeared and presumably dead tycoon dad (Dominic West) who vanished in ’09 while researching Himiko, the legendary shaman queen who was buried alive on the island of Yamatai, somewhere southeast of Japan.

A clue found in one of her dad’s effects results in Lara travelling to Hong Kong and then paying a ship owner (Daniel Wu as the good-looking, physically agile Asian guy who has to appear in all international-appeal action films) to take her to this place of rocky foreboding.

I paid no attention yesterday to a video clip of Hillary Clinton delivering her latest gaffe — i.e., a statement that is true but politically unpopular. While attending some kind of conference in India last weekend, Clinton explained that she carried the more economically advanced (which always goes hand in hand with “better educated” and “politically progressive”) states in the 2016 election, and that Donald Trump carried the none-too-bright bumblefucks — rural, despairing, Fox News-watching, racially resentful, angry, mostly overweight, appalling dress sense, in some cases opioid-addicted, etc. Which — hello? — is 100% accurate and then some.

And totally beside the point. Machine Democrats want Clinton to keep her yap shut about the ’16 election permanently, or better yet go away and stay away for the rest of her life. We all understand that bumblefuck resentment (“Don’t put us down because we put a malicious sociopath-tyrant into the White House…that would hurt our feelings and inspire us to re-elect him!”) could hurt their chances of winning big in the 2018 midterms, and Dems now have reason to be optimistic after last night’s narrow win by 33-year-old Democrat Connor Lamb in a special House election in southwestern Pennsylvania.

It’s understood that middle-class, middle-budget reality dramas have been consigned to cable and the indie realm. (Speaking of which you can’t do much better on that score than Collateral, the recently popped Netflix series with Carey Mulligan as a police inspector). This means, I presume, that sturdy, well-written dramas about women, even in this revolutionary era, are still having a tough time being funded above the Spirit Award level (i.e., $20 million tops).

I’m not saying it’s impossible to score backing for a mildly expensive, character-driven drama about a woman character played by a mid-range star, but the usual resistance doesn’t seem to have changed, at least in the realm of theatrical make-or-break.

Erin Brockovich, which was made 19 years ago for $52 million (or roughly $75 million in 2018 dollars), probably wouldn’t be made today as a theatrical film — it would be produced by Netflix or Amazon. The Steven Soderbergh-directed film, which opened in March 2000, earned $125.5M domestic and $256.2M worldwide.

And Alan Parker‘s well-respected Shoot The Moon, which cost $12 million to make in ’81 or nearly $31 million by the 2018 economy, would probably have to go Netflix or Amazon also, and even then who knows? Theatrically the Diane Keaton-Albert Finney marital drama was a bust — it only made $9.2 million domestic.

On the other hand a version of Paul Mazursky‘s An Unmarried Woman, which cost $2,515,000 (roughly $10 million in 2018 dollars) to shoot in 1977 and went on to earn $24 million in ’78 or just under $100 million by the ’18 economy, would probably be funded today.

Ditto a version of Alan Pakula‘s Klute, which was made in 1970 for $2.5 million or $16 million by the measure of 2018, would probably be funded today. Maybe. The urban thriller wound up earning $12,512,637, which translates into $80 million today. (The 1970 to 2018 multiple is 6.42.)

I feel obliged to attend a 6 pm screening this evening of Roar Uthaug‘s Lara Croft (Warner Bros., 3.16) at the Arclight. God help me. Imagine the feeling of going to see a movie directed by a guy named “Roar.” I’m not going to joke about a sister named “Meow” or a brother named “Rowlf”, but what kind of sadistic couple, really, would name their kid “Roar”? That’s like naming him “Sue” or “Cyclops.”

I would love to enjoy a gripping, well-made actioner in the vein of Steven Spielberg‘s Raiders of the Lost Ark (which didn’t defy physics as much as the next three films in the series), but of course the big-budget, whoo-hoo action film aesthetic went over the CG cliff years ago. Nobody except for a relative handful of directors (Kathryn Bigelow, George Miller, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, J.C, Chandor, Doug Liman and a few others) care about real thrills. The fantasy-superhero-bullshit aesthetic has murdered the concept of great reality-based physical action. Killed it dead.

Posted two months ago: Nobody leaps off a sinking ship in the middle of a raging typhoon and lives. Nobody grabs hold of an overhanging tree limb at the last second and thereby escapes going over a super-tall jungle waterfall. What kind of fingernail-chewing moron would pay money to watch this shite? CG stunts of this sort aren’t worth spit in the realm of real-deal physics. Yes, I realize that’s a dirty concept these days.

A little more than six years ago I posted a piece called “To Hell With Physics“:

In 1987 Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they’re both falling to their deaths…not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags…whomp!…that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.

Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol. An American operative is being chased over a rooftop by baddies in Budapest. He fires some rounds, kills a couple of guys, and then escapes by leaping off the building, continuing to shoot as he falls four or five stories to the pavement below. He’s saved, however, when he lands on a modest air mattress that’s about one-tenth the size of Lethal Weapon‘s tent-sized bag.

Yesterday came an announcement that Pearl Street Films, the production company headed by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, will be totally supporting “inclusion riders” (i.e., a diversity-hiring provision) on their forthcoming projects.

A friend writes: “I have friends who work with Ben and Matt, and I know Matt is trying to get a new movie off the ground as we speak, going around this week pitching it. (He’s over at Fox today.) So on the eve of trying to get this movie set up, they announce this inclusion-rider thing. The strategy seems kinda transparent.”

Translation: We get what’s happening — include us in — fund us — onward!

A producer pal: “Two guys who have skirted by on the #metoo block” — i.e., have narrowly dodged the Robespierre guillotine — “are now going to embrace the #metoo theology a la Frances McDormand‘s suggestion? No surprise.” He added, however, a fun fact: “No idea how such a rider would be enforceable!”