Three days ago it was reported that “archaeologists” working in the Guadalupe sand dunes have dug up an intact plaster sphinx head — one of 21 sphinxes that were part of an Egyptian movie set built 95 years ago for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. The 300-pound artifact is the second head to have been recovered from the wind-swept area. The latest discovery is noteworthy, according to Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen, because it’s covered with the original brown paint.

I don’t know what’s behind Bryan Singer‘s absence from the London-based Bohemian Rhapsody shoot over the last week or so, but I strongly suspect that it’s not due to a “personal health matter,” which is how a spokesperson has explained the situation.

Rhapsody, which will tell the saga of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen and which is already being eyed as a 2018 award-season hopeful, has been temporarily shuttered due to Singer’s diverted attention, according to a 20th Century Fox statement released Friday. The term “unexpected unavailability” was also used to explain Singer’s situation.

via GIPHY

The 52 year-old director reportedly hasn’t shown up since the end of the Thanksgiving holiday, or over the last five days. It’s obviously possible that some health issue is a factor, but something doesn’t sound or smell right. Something else seems to be going on. There are rumblings…who knows?

Variety has reported that “a representative for the director said the halt was due to a personal health matter concerning Bryan and his family,” and that Singer “hopes to get back to work on the film soon after the holidays.” Okay, here’s hoping.

Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer.

Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury.

My first thought during my initial viewing of Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square was “hmmm, the lead actor is appealing. He has a low-key Pierce Brosnan sexy thing going on, and those thin red designer glasses he’s wearing are very cool.” His name, I quickly discovered, is Claes Bang, a Danish actor and musician. Right away I thought, “He could be the new 007”, but that notion was kicked around and dismissed fairly quickly. Bang is 50, or 13 years younger than Brosnan, but perhaps not quite young enough if you figure that Daniel Craig is around for one more film.

But he has this quality, this vibe. I’d definitely like to see him in more stuff. So would Tatyana.

Not long ago CB came to town, and so I asked to meet him. We sat down for 25 minutes inside the West Hollywood offices of Sunshine Sachs. His name, he told me, is pronounced “Clayhs Bahng.” Not synonymous with “dead bang” but at the same time not “buhng.” He was (and presumably still is) open, matter-of-fact, attuned. And yet reserved, measured. However you want to define X-factor…

Who has seen The Square, and what was your opinion? 5:35 pm update: That many, huh? Well, it’s easily one of the best films of the year. Your loss.

A friend asked about what kind of gifts and goodies had arrived over the past few weeks to promote the various award-season films. He mentioned the pink stuffed Okja pig as an example. My response: “The Okja stuffed pig wasn’t graft. It wasn’t a gift. It was a pink nightmare. It was repulsion and indigestion. I had one thought when I unpacked this ugly beast, and that was “aackkhh!….into the dumpster”! What a grotesque thing to have lying around your home or apartment. Tatyana loved it, wanted to keep it. I threw it out the moment she wasn’t looking. She hasn’t asked since but if she does I’ll just say to her ‘what pig?’ And she’ll say, ‘The cute pink pig…I liked it so much!’ ‘Oh, right,’ I’ll say. And then I’ll say, ‘Uhm, I spilled coffee on it last week and it looked really bad so I threw it out. The spotless pink perfection thing was ruined…sorry.'”

Posted by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, earlier today — Friday, 12.1: “The guilty plea by MichaelFlynn is different — and more serious — than the charges against one-time Trump campaign chairman PaulManafort. Manafort was a part of Trump’s inner orbit for a handful of months during the spring and summer of 2016. But he was long gone by the time Trump won the White House. And the charges against Manafort have to do with money laundering and the Ukraine, not Russia.

“It’s also impossible for Trump to dismiss the role Flynn played in his campaign and White House as he did with George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about interactions with foreign officials close to the Russian government.

“The Flynn guilty plea comes from someone who, until the day he was reluctantly fired by Trump as national security adviser, sat at the absolute epicenter of Trumpworld. And, unlike Manafort, Flynn’s charge deals directly with his interactions with the Russian ambassador — and goes to the very core of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

“The following things are facts:

“Mueller was appointed as special counsel by Trump Justice Department deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Flynn was an extremely close and influential adviser to Trump as a candidate and as president. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“There’s no ‘fake news’ media in either of those three sentences. Or Democrats. Or hoaxes. Or witch hunts.

“And, with the Flynn guilty plea, there is absolutely no thinking person who could possibly believe that Trump’s presidency is not in some level of peril now.

Traffic on the 101 freeway killed me last night, and so I gave up trying to attend last night’s Judi Dench tribute fundraiser at the Ritz Carlton Bacara. The event was organized by Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. It turned out that in all of her 82 years Dench had never been to Santa Barbara before last night. Really. With all her activity and connections in Los Angeles for so many years.

Judi Dench, Santa Barbara Film festival director Roger Durling during red-carpet portion of last night’s Kirk Douglas Award festivities.

(l. to r.) Armie Hammer, Roger Durling, Jeff Bridges, Judi Dench, Ali Fazal.

The main focus was on Dench’s Oscar-hopeful performance as Queen Victoria in Victoria and Abdul, which may or may not be part of the 2017 Best Actress Derby. Dench was nominated 20 years ago, of course, for playing the same monarch in Mrs. Brown (’97). My three favorite Dench performances were in Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love (in which she played Elizabeth I) and Notes On A Scandal, in which she more or less lusted after costar Cate Blanchett.

I never responded all that heartily to her performances as M in all those 007 films — they’re a blur.

Ali Fazal (who plays Abdul Karim in Victoria and Abdul), Santa Barbara mainstay Jeff Bridges and Call My By Your Name‘s Armie Hammer attended the Dench tribute.

Received this morning: “As the nominations for Critics’ Choice are upon us, [please] consider the unforgettable performance Bill Skarsgard gave as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Andres Muschietti’s reimagining of IT. Skarsgard gave a genuinely unsettling and transformative performance that transcended the hair and makeup. As the centerpiece of IT, Skarsgard’s performance won high praise. We hope you will consider him for Best Supporting Actor.” I’m sorry but I felt that Skarsgaard pushed the demonic evil button way too hard. The point of the opening rain-gutter scene was that Pennywise was supposed to be disarming Georgie so he would trust this evil clown enough to reach in and retrieve his paper boat. Except Pennywise’s voice and expressions were completely threatening (those yellow cat eyes, that cackling purr), and so the scene was about what a complete idiot George was. Honestly? I enjoyed Tim Curry’s Pennywise in the 1990 TV miniseries a lot more.

Yesterday I posted a piece called “Strange Avoidance Mechanism.” It questioned a group decision by six contributors to an 11.29 L.A. Times Oscar Buzzmeter piece (Anne Thompson, Tom O’Neil, Glenn Whipp, Kenny Turan, Justin Chang, Nicole Sperling) to name six films — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour, Get Out and Lady Bird — most likely to “lead this year’s Oscar race.”

What was wrong with that? Oh, nothing except for the fact that a very likely Best Picture nominee and, to go by the Oscar fortunes of Gotham and Spirit Award winners over the last five or six years, a likely Best Picture winner was more or less ignored — Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. In fact Chang, Turan, Whipp, Sperling and O’Neil picked Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender. But Anne Thompson didn’t, and so the other six films ranked higher.

I should have just written Thompson, but I wrote them all a letter instead. “I don’t think I went off the handle at all with this piece,” it began. “It was a measured, carefully phrased analysis that concluded with a head-scratcher. I simply pointed out the likelihood, given the pattern of the last few years, of a Gotham or Spirit Award winner ending up as Best Picture Oscar winner. It’s not an unreasonable presumption as it’s based upon statistical fact. And yet somehow you guys, in the aggregate, managed to exclude Call Me By Your Name from your list of the six most likely Best Picture contenders or winners. (“…which movies will lead this year’s Oscar race.”)

Can I ask something? Who among you is predicting with a straight face that Darkest Hour might “lead” the pack or win a Best Picture Oscar? It might be nominated, sure, but winning? C’mon.

Not only that, you also managed to avoid naming The Post, which is easily locked as a Best Picture nominee and, given the present political current, a likely winner — it’s safe, steady, boomer-friendly (Tom and Meryl), well-written, staunchly liberal, and it really, really doesn’t like Trump. Hello?

You have to play it carefully when you talk with Joe Wright, the 45 year-old director of Darkest Hour. You want to be respectful, of course, but you don’t want say the wrong thing. Because for seven-plus years (’05 through ’12) Wright was a knockout, high-style director with all kinds of exciting, mad-thrust energy, and then, all of sudden, he seemed to lose his vision or his footing or you-tell-me.

So you don’t want to ask him, “Uhm, have you gotten that magic-crazy thing back, or are you still recalculating and figuring out the next move?” Because that would sound insulting.

You can’t say what a audacious, flirting-with-genius talent he seemed to be during that seven-year period when he made Pride and Prejudice (’05), Atonement (’07), Hanna (’11) and the drop-to-your-knees Anna Karenina, which I found brilliant and dazzling and everything in between. Because telling him how great he seemed during this period would sound like an allusion to the disappointment his fans felt when he made Pan (’15), a costly, poorly-reviewed kids fantasy flick that lost money.

It follows that you wouldn’t want to ask him, as I did during a quickie interview two or three weeks ago, why he made Pan in the first place. Because he’ll just say, “Well, let’s just that one go.”

And you can’t express a hope that he’ll make another high-style work of genius in the vein of Anna Karenina because that would sound like “so what’s happened to you since Anna Karenina?”

And if you’re the last on a long list you can’t suggest doing a video interview because he’ll probably say, “I’m a little tired…I don’t know.” Okay, forget it.

What I said to Joe, whom I regard as a very important director in the realm of James Cameron and David Fincher, was that he obviously “shot the hell” out of Darkest Hour. But that wound up sounding as if “shooting the hell out of it” was Wright’s way of compensating for a relatively rote, somewhat conventional biopic, which Darkest Hour is to a certain extent. And that’s fine. It is what it is.

Darkest Hour reminds us that would-be tyrants like Adolf Hitler are still around, and that we could all use more fellows with the steel backbone of a Winston Churchill to stand up to them and inspire the old fighting spirit.

I admired and enjoyed Darkest Hour, and I respect the visual energy that Wright used to punch it up as best he could. But I still want the old Wright back. I can’t help myself. I’m fine with Darkest Hour, but I want a return of Joe, the gifted madman.

Here’s a portion of first review of Anna Karenina, which I posted on 9.6.12:

“Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus Features, 11.16.12) will have its detractors (in my screening today five or six people were actually chuckling at it during a high-emotion scene in the late second act) but for me it’s a serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

“You either go with the proscenium-arch grandiosity of a film like Anna Karenina or you don’t (and I was just talking in the Bell Lightbox lobby with a critic who didn’t care for it) but if you ask me it has all the essential ingredients of a bold-as-brass Best Picture contender — an excitingly original approach, cliff-leaping audacity, complex choreography, the balls to go classic and crazy at the same time, a wild mixture of theatricality and romantic realism, a superbly tight and expressive script by Tom Stoppard and wowser operatic acting with a special hat-tip to Keira Knightley as Anna — a Best Actress performance if I’ve ever seen one.

I have to drive all the way up to Santa Barbara’s Bacara Resort & Spa for a special Kirk Douglas Award Ceremony honoring Dame Judi Dench for Excellence, and particularly for her stirring performance in Victoria and Abdul. The ceremony is being thrown by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival and particularly by HE’s own Roger Durling. And I’m late as it is. I’ll probably get there by 6:45 pm or thereabouts. And then I’ll have to drive all the way back at 10 pm.

6:05 pm, somewhere near Chesebro Canyon.

Update: Bust! I left West Hollywood at 4:05 pm. Two hours later I was on the 101 in Calabassas, a little past Malibu Canyon and stuck in “accident” traffic. Even without the bumper-to-bumper I would be looking at a minimum of 100 minutes to get to the Bacara Resort & Spa in Goleta, which is maybe 20 minutes past Santa Barbara. But the traffic jam wouldn’t quit. I sat there. I edged forward a few feet and sat here some more. “To hell with it,” I said out loud. I got off the freeway and turned around. I stopped at a Malibu Canyon Starbucks to wait out the commuter traffic. I apologized to Roger, telling him things were impossible. He’ll send me photos and video tomorrow. Cheers to Judi Dench and every Los Angeles-based journo who, unlike myself, was smart enough to leave by 2:30 or 3 pm.

Four major awards-giving groups have recently announced their top pics, and so far the leading hottie is Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. That is, if you go by the top prize given by Gotham Awards plus the six Spirit Award nominations earned by the CMBYN team. No guarantees, but with six nominations the odds favor Guadagnino taking the Spirits’ Best Feature trophy.

On the other hand the New York Film Critics Circle have just chosen Lady Bird as 2017’s Best Film, but the winners of that award and the Best Picture Oscar champs have only occasionally overlapped. Two days ago the more mainstream-minded National Board of Review gave their top award to Steven Spielberg‘s The Post. This may or may not indicate the voting preferences of Academy and guild members next month, although it probably will.

There’s no disputing, however, that over the last few years the winners of the Spirit and Gotham awards have mostly gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar. In five of the past six years, in fact, winners of the Spirit Best Feature prize have gone on to win five Best Picture Oscars — 2011’s The Artist, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, 2014’s Birdman, 2015’s Spotlight and 2016’s Moonlight.

It would seem at this stage that any half-attuned Oscar prognosticator would identify Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender. And yet when six Oscar experts were recently polled by the L.A. Times (“From Dunkirk to Coco: The 2018 Oscars Buzzmeter”), their six biggest favorites didn’t include the Guadagnino.

Instead they chose Lady Bird (smart call), Darkest Hour (which hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning Best Picture — Best Actor shoo-in Gary Oldman is Focus Features’ only competitive pony), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (a respected film that was shut out in the Spirit Award noms and by the Gothams), Dunkirk (total shut-out among NYFCC and NBR voters), Get Out (Spirit nominee, Gotham winner + Best First Film award from NYFCC) and The Shape of Water (shunned by Spirits, blanked by NBR and NYFCC).

Most of these six films could theoretically win the 2017 Best Picture Oscar, but what could Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, Vanity Fair‘s Nicole Sperling, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, The Envelope‘s Glenn Whipp and L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan have been thinking to have not selected Guadagnino’s film as at least a hot contender? How could they possibly size up the field and go “naaah, don’t think so” when it came to the one film in the 2017 Best Picture constellation that many have called a masterpiece and a classic slow-burn love story?

In fact Chang, Turan, Whipp, Sperling and O’Neil picked Call Me By Your Name as a leading Best Picture contender, but the other six films ranked higher.

It’s odd, man. Really odd.

If you go strictly by Metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings, Call Me By Your Name is the second highest with a 95% and 98% rating, respectively for an average of 96.5%. How could that esteem possibly translate into six other films being ranked as hotter contenders?

Darkest Hour is the lowest rated of all with 73% Metacritic and 85% Rotten Tomatoes tallies. Lady Bird has the highest ratings with a Metacritic 94% and a Rotten Tomatoes 100%. Dunkirk has a 94% Metacritic vs. 92% Rotten Tomatoes. Get Out has an 84% Metacritic vs. a Rotten Tomatoes 99%. Three Billboards has an 87% Metacritic vs. 94% Rotten Tomatoes. The Shape of Water has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes vs. an 86% Metacritic.

It doesn’t matter to me if Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene, which is slated to open domestically on 3.30.18, goes out as a Weinstein Co. or Focus Features release. The movie’s the thang, not the distributor. (There’s no Weinstein Co. logo at the end of this trailer, but a Focus Features logo does appear.) Davis’s film is presumably a feminist slant on the New Testament legend, written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, with Rooney Mara playing the reformed harlot Mary Magdalene.

It’s also a slightly revisionist take with Jesus Christ, who died at age 33, being portrayed by a 43 year-old Joaquin Phoenix, who actually looks like he’s 54.

It’s fascinating to contemplate a scene in which Jesus and Mary Magdelene (Rooney Mara) are chatting on a hilly Italian coastline (pic was shot in Matera, the Puglia region, Napoli and Sicily) and looking out at the Mediterranean. On top of which you can’t hear the dialogue. I defy HE readers to tell me what Mara and Pheonix are saying to each other starting at the 56-second mark. Mara: “Pisahtla minnup-minnupah kaht?” Phoenix (at 1:00 minute mark): “Nuhnwah sinkdat bad pitnyah puhtohit.”

Costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Apostle Peter and Tahar Rahim as Judas Iscariot. Pic will probably be released on 3.30.18.