“I’ll tell you what I want. I want to walk around New York City at a fairly vigorous clip. I want to love and support my wife and my sons every way I can. I want to sail into the mystic. I want to stay in touch with everyone and offer as much offer affection, trust, intellectual engagement and friendship as I reasonably can. I want to live forever. I want good health, and to me that also means good spiritual health. I want to keep most of my hair and never grow breasts or a pot belly. I want Japanese or South Korean-level wifi wherever I go. I want to read and know everything. I want to bask in love, family, friendship and the purring of my three cats until the end of time. I want several pairs of slim ass-hugging jeans. I want to be clean shaven. I want well-made shoes, preferably Italian suede or Bruno Magli or John Varvatos. I want to keep all my Blurays forever. I want fresh gourmet food but in modest portions. I want color, aromas, travel. I want challenging hiking trails in high Swiss places. I know it’s not possible, but I’d prefer to always be in the company of slender people. I want to zoom around on my Majesty and use the Mini Cooper only when it rains or when I need to buy a lot of groceries. I want mobility and adaptability and the smell of great humming, rumbling cities. I want European-style subways, buses, trains, rental cars. I want a long Norman Lloyd-type life, and I insist that my mental faculties stay electric and crackling forever. I’ll always want a couple of folly-loaded Jackery battery chargers for my iPhone 6 Plus. I want occasional bowls of plain yogurt and a constant supply of fruit and vegetables. I want beautiful scenery from time to time. I want to hang with golden retrievers and other high-affection dogs. I want to be up early and go to bed late every day of my life, and take 45-minute naps around 4 pm. And I’ll always want a 65-inch OLED along with an Oppo Bluray player with region-2 capabilities plus Amazon, Vudu, Netflix and everything else on a Roku player. And I always want little packets of strong Italian Starbucks Instant somewhere nearby. And I want to re-visit Venice, Prague, Rome, Paris, Arcos de la Frontera and Hanoi every two or three years. I don’t want to get my head chopped off but I want to visit the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iran) as well as Russia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ukraine before long, preferably on a motorcycle or at least by train.” — An earlier version of this, a riff on a “Carlos the Jackal” quote, was posted on 11.29.14.

I’ve never heard of cats eating anything acidic, much less seen it with my own eyes. Earlier today Anya, our five-month-old Bluepoint Siamese female, ate two chunks of freshly sliced tomato. I was astonished.

The great Dennis Hooper died seven and a half years ago, and Nick Ebeling‘s Along For The Ride is…what, the 13th or 14th documentary about the guy? In 1980 I showed up for an interview with Hopper at a midtown Manhattan hotel. We were supposed to chat about Out of The Blue, Hopper’s first directorial effort since The Last Movie, which had been a total calamity. Blue was actually a fairly decent film, but Hopper didn’t come down to the lobby at the appointed time, probably because he was doing lines in his hotel room. I finally gave up and left. Ebeling’s doc is mainly about the making of The Last Movie. It’ll play during a special Dennis Hopper retrospective event at the Metrograph on 11.3 before opening in Los Angeles on 12.8.

I’m filling out my Sundance press accreditation form this weekend. This led to memories of last January’s festival, and a particularly awful time I had watching Alexander Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War PTSD drama. Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service deals with nearly the exact same subject, but in a way that I found ten times more affecting and effective. Maybe because I didn’t have to deal with Alden Ehrenreich, whose gloomy-Rabbinical-student performance all but sank Yellow Birds.

As far as I can tell Yellow Birds never found a North American distributor. Which, if true, suggests that buyers felt the same way I did. Like me they probably sat in their Eccles seats in a state of numb submission, toughing it out and waiting for something (anything!) interesting to happen.

How can the Sundance guys approve films like The Yellow Birds and yet turn down well-made genre flicks, which they’ve been known to do from time to time? It just reenforces the idea that the term “Sundance film” is not a myth. John Cooper and Trevor Groth are known for preferring a certain kind of solemn, squishy, angsty, social-issue, ahead-of-the-curve, relationshippy black-gay-transgender politically correct film.

If Sundance had been going in ’73 and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero had been submitted, they would’ve turned it down because it’s got too many car chases and is about rednecks smuggling moonshine.

The Yellow Birds is about the investigation of the death of an Iraq War combatant named “Murph” (i.e., Daniel Murphy, played by Tye Sheridan), but more precisely about evasions and suppressions on the part of Murph’s PTSD-aflicted comrade, John Bartie (Ehrenreich), when he returns home.

Murph’s mom Maureen (Jennifer Aniston) naturally wants to know what happened, and Bartie’s mom Amy (Toni Collette) is seriously concerned about her son’s totally withdrawn, zombie-like manner. There’s also a Sergeant Sterling (Jack Huston) with his own buried trauma issues, and a CID investigator (Jason Patric) with a persistent interest in what happened between Murph and John.

The Yellow Birds has moments of visual beauty but is otherwise disappointing — it doesn’t connect or sink in. And the ending is seriously weak tea.

After it ended I ran into a Los Angeles guy who runs a film series, and so I briefly shared my reservations about the film and Ehrenreich in particular. He said he “liked” The Yellow Birds and so did the people he was sitting with, and that Ehrenreich’s ability to reanimate Han Solo wasn’t an issue as far as Yellow Birds is concerned.

This morning Jordan Ruimy sent along a straw poll about the “best current film directors.” Reddit was the principal launch site for the poll. Out of 24,469 votes cast as of 12:45 pm Pacific the highest rated director is…Denis Villeneuve? 1442 votes or 5.88% of the total. Weird. I was under the impression (a) that Blade Runner 2049 is admired but far from universally loved, (b) that some were as annoyed by Arrival as I was, and (c) that many viewers felt that Emily Blunt picking up some strange Latino guy in a bar and bringing him home in Sicario made no sense at all.

Villeneuve is admired — I get that — but there’s a dissenting community out there. Nonetheless Reddit readers have spoken — bow down to the new King Shit.

I’ll allow that Villeneueve is an accomplished, well-respected helmer, but should he really rate higher than (my personal preferences among the straw poll names, numbering 30 or thereabouts but not in this order) Roman Polanski, Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), James Cameron, the Coen brothers, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles, Tony Gilroy, Pawel Pawlikowksi, David O. Russell, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuaron, David Fincher, Kenneth Lonergan, Steven Soderbergh, Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Matt Reeves, Bennett Miller, Cristian Mungiu, Darren Aronofsky, Phillip Noyce, Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Asghar Farhadi and Cary Fukunaga?

The poll is kind of weird in a few ways. One, why aren’t the names listed alphabetically? Two, where is Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino? (After A Bigger Splash and with everyone waiting with bated breath for his two-and-a half-hour Suspiria remake, it’s derelict to not include him.) Three, if you’re dead you obviously can’t be among the best “current” film directors so why is Abbas Kiarostami included?

My cream-of-the-croppers again, but this time in order of preference:

1. Asghar Farhadi. 2. Luca Guadagnino. 3. Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu. 4. Cristian Mungiu. 5. Darren Aronofsky. 6. Joel and Ethan Coen. 7. David Fincher, 8. Martin Scorsese, 9. Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), 10. Chris Nolan, 11. James Cameron, 12. Alfonso Cuaron, 13. Pawel Pawlikowski, 14. David O. Russell, 15. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 16. Guillermo del Toro, 17. Matt Reeves, 18. Bennett Miller, 19. Roman Polanski, 20. Michael Haneke, 21. Steve McQueen, 22. Wes Anderson, 23. Steven Soderbergh, 24. Tony Gilroy, 25. Phillip Noyce, 26. Fernando Meirelles, 27. Cary Fukunaga, 28. Kenneth Lonergan, 29. Michael Haneke, 30. Walter Salles.

Among A.O. Scott’s remarks: “An atmosphere of paranoia and political suspicion…The Manchurian Candidate launched a paranoid style….something you have to decode, figure out, possibly not trust…Oliver Stone‘s JFK was ahead of its time…where we live now is in a destablized, uncertain, somewhat suspicious and paranoid relationship to reality…we’re all in the mindset of assuming that there must be a conspiracy…9/11, Benghazi or anything else…that there’s some kind of secret story that’s not being told… some kind of truth that’s being obscured.”

There’s this dispiriting notion afoot in Hollywood culture right now, which is that a film isn’t marketable if it’s “just” a drama, “just” a crime thriller, “just” a touching story about a desperate woman in a jam, etc. By this jaded formula new movies made in the mold of Chinatown, The Parallax View, Kramer vs. Kramer, No Way Out and Mississippi Burning (if someone was dumb enough to do this) would all go straight to cable.

The thinking, as everyone knows, is that only big-event movies can open theatrically, and everything else has to go straight to Netflix or Amazon or HBO or some other home-media option. The lowbrows and none-too-brights go to the plexes for their lowest-common-denominator, jizz-whizz, porno-violent franchise fantasy bullshit (Jigsaw, Tyler Perry’s Boo 2!, Geostorm, Happy Death Day) while smarter, older, more cultivated viewers prefer to watch new films at home on their 60-inch monitors.

This, at least, is how it seems to be. The theatrical realm has been so mongrelized and generally degraded by the big studios. Multiplexes have essentially become FX funhouses, indoor amusement parks, places where lower life forms (i.e., the dregs of society) congregate. Every now and then a really good film will do well financially, but more and more, it seems, films that are spirit-drainers or flat-out painful to sit through sell a lot of tickets also.

And then you turn around and watch David Fincher‘s excellent Netflix miniseries Mindhunter, and you think “well, who cares if the theatrical experience has become simultaneously degraded and over-priced? I just finished watching all ten episodes of Mindhunter, and I was riveted all the way through. Way more satisfying than most theatrical features I’ve seen this year.”

Obviously my situation is special. I’m going to continue to see worthwhile or semi-worthwhile films all year long at festivals and press screenings, so I’m not dealing with the same kind of hard choices that upscale, well-educated ticket-buyers are facing. But if I wasn’t an accredited journalist I’d probably be saying “Jesus, I don’t know about theatrical any more…I’m getting sick of superhero flicks and I hate effects-driven material, and more and more I’m thinking ‘fuck it…I’ll watch what I want to watch at home.”

On Thursday night I paid $17 and change to see Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service, a character-driven struggling-vets drama. No, I didn’t love it but I respected what it was putting out and was once again taken by another first-rate Miles Teller performance, and at no time did it make me feel angry or frustrated. But there weren’t many people in the theatre, I can tell you. 25 or 30 at most.

TYFYS opened yesterday on 2054 screens and made about $1.5 million, averaging about $733 per situation. George Clooney‘s Suburbicon is doing worse — 2046 screens, earned $1.1 million yesterday, averaging $538 per screen. The completely respectable, undeniably well made Only The Brave, which opened last weekend (10.20), is naturally doing worse this weekend — $1,055,000 yesterday, $409 per screen.

No self-respecting cinefile approves of colorizing black-and-white movies, of course, but colorizing monochrome stills can be a respectable thing if  done well. I’m especially impressed with the below photo of the 11.24.63 Oswald shooting. The other three look like tinted monochrome, I feel, but every now and then you’ll notice one that really looks special. 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 for one approve of carefully tinted black-and-white newsreel footage.

In yesterday’s Hollywood Reporter actress-singer Janis Paige, 95, posted a first-hand saga of a traumatic attempted rape. It happened in 1944, when Paige was 22. Her assailant was Alfred Bloomingdale, the compulsive, dick-driven heir to the Bloomingdale fortune who was 28 at the time. The incident was ugly and brutal, but at least Paige managed an escape.

A hot ticket in her ’40s and ’50s heyday, Paige ends the article by saying “maybe there’s a special place in hell for the Alfred Bloomingdales or Harvey Weinsteins of the world, and for those who aid and then deny their grossly demented behavior.”

For some reason Paige doesn’t mention Bloomingdale’s most sordid Los Angeles-based relationship. It happened between the early ’70s and early ’80s, and was with the notorious Vicki Morgan, whose sad story was told in Gordon Basichis‘s “Beautiful Bad Girl.” Alfred and his wife Betsy had been friendly with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, but Bloomingdale’s kinky cavortings with Morgan (reportedly sado-masochistic in nature) tarnished his rep in that regard. I distinctly recall Mort Sahl calling the Bloomingdale-Morgan scandal “a cynical attempt to humanize the Reagan administration.”

Bloomingdale died from cancer on 8.23.82. Morgan quickly filed a palimony suit against Bloomingdale’s estate. 11 months after his passing Morgan was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her gay roommate.

Janis Paige Esquire cover, which appeared in mid 1954.

Earlier this week a friend saw Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17), the little-kid-with-a-disfigured-face movie with Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Jacob Tremblay.

“It was better than expected,” he says. “I was actually surprised at how likable it was. And it doesn’t just focus on the disfigured kid. At some point the film starts to shift toward other characters linked to the kid and tell their own stories, with each chapter being named after them. There must have been around three chapters dedicated to three separate characters.

“It seems as if critics are already shooting darts at it, mostly because of that misguided trailer, so who knows how the reviews will turn out? But all the child actors are really good in this, all of them delivering is a very believable way. I bought the story of the kid as well. It never felt maudlin or sugar-coated. Roberts was also excellent, probably her best work since…what, Duplicity?

“We shouldn’t be so surprised that Wonder has turned out to be a good movie. Chbosky, who brought a sensitive and delicate touch to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is no slouch. The ending is a bit flat, but most of the movie works.”

In an Indiewire piece posted earlier today, producer, industry consultant and former Fine Line production executive Liz Manne outed herself as a major anonymous source for a controversial, once-heavily-criticized 1998 Premiere story that described a culture of sexual harassment at New Line Cinema, which at the time was run by Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne.  

The article, written by John Connolly and fact-checked by Premiere staffers (including then-editor Jim Meigs and senior film editor Glenn Kenny), was called “Flirting With Disaster.”

The article asserted that all kinds of nasty shenanigans (drinking, drugs, sexual harassment) were happening at New Line, and that Shaye and Lynne ran the place “like a college dorm,” according to a producer who spoke anonymously to Connolly. The piece began with a story about a boozy New Line party that happened the year before (1992) at a lodge in Snowmass, Colorado, and about how Lynne made an aggressive sexual pass at an unnamed female executive. 

That executive, according to Manne’s Indiewire piece, was Manne herself. As noted, she flat-out admits to having been one of Connolly’s anonymous sources.

In hindsight, the Connolly piece can be appreciated as a tough expose that described a predatory climate that sounds all too familiar by today’s understandings. But because it depended on anonymous sources (when she left the company Manne signed an exit agreement that forbade her from talking to anyone about anything in any context) the article was strongly attacked as an example of reckless or irresponsible journalism.

Two of the attackers were Movie City News’ David Poland and Variety‘s Peter Bart. Coincidentally, there was also a “Reverse Angle” article on page 51 in that same issue of Premiere, written by Harvey Weinstein of all people, that complained about “the reckless use of unnamed sources.”

From Poland’s 6.17.98 MCN article: “Can you say ‘hatchet job?’ I know for sure that Premiere magazine can. It had to be the phrase of the day when it decided to print its story, ‘Flirting With Disaster’” on alleged sexual and drug-related misconduct at New Line Cinema. I am often disgusted with the state of entertainment journalism, but usually it’s because we throw softballs in exchange for access to the talent that sells magazines, newspapers and TV shows. (And yes, some Web sites.) This time, it’s the opposite. 

“What was Premiere thinking when it ran the results of John Connolly‘s eight-month ‘investigation’ which added up to little more than a handful of gossipy accusations by unnamed sources that any reporter working this beat on a regular basis could have come up with over a three-day weekend?”

Hey, I know — let’s have George Clooney get blown up and burnt to death on the way back from Westchester to Manhattan in Michael Clayton. Forget the mystical moment with the horses. He’s a flawed guy anyway. A fixer, a janitor and a shortfaller so let’s kill him. Better that way. We can just insert a bit in which Clayton, before leaving for Westchester, mails that incriminating memo to the N.Y. Times. That way the audience will know that Tilda Swinton, Ken Howard and U-North will pay in the end.

U-North, for the film Michael Clayton from Victor Melton on Vimeo.