Now that Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant has more or less tanked domestically (a pathetic $67 million so far), will any of the learned fanboys who creamed in their pants when reviews popped in early May admit that they over-sold it to their trusting readers, and that they basically didn’t have the balls to call a spade a spade?

Of course not, but 71% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang gave it a thumbs-up. For whatever fickle reasons ticket buyers didn’t agree for the most part. Could this have been because this 20th Century Fox release more or less blows? I was looking like an outlier when I called it crap on 5.7.17, but it’s fair to say I’m looking a bit more sage now.

“I didn’t dislike Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant — I hated it,” I wrote. “And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this.

“If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film.

“Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself. I’m not going to tap out the usual story, character and actor rundown. All you need to know is that I didn’t give a damn about any of Alien: Covenant. Nothing. I was muttering ‘Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou’ the whole time.”

During an appearance on England’s Sunday Brunch talk show, Dan Aykroyd basically called Ghostbusters director Paul Feig an irresponsible asshole, claiming that Feig “spent too much on it and he didn’t shoot scenes we suggested to him…[when we mentioned] several scenes that were going to be needed, Feig said, ‘No, we don’t need them.’ And then we tested the movie and they needed them, and he had to go back — about $30 to $40 million in reshoots.”

From my own HE review, posted on 7.10.16: “It’s formula bullshit, of course — what else could it be? — but if you can lower your standards and just sit back and take it, it’s 80 minutes of silly ‘fun’ — fun defined as nodding submission to a super-budget presentation of a franchise concept that’s moderately amusing here and there and doesn’t piss you off. But after the first 80 minutes it eats itself, leaving us to endure 35 minutes of CG overkill — Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel finale meets the Independence Day sequel meets the Pillsbury doughboy monster meets the end of the world.”

Using the oft-quoted standard of “simply making people laugh is the lowest form of humor,” the following are HE’s picks for the 30 best all-time film comedies. Inclusion doesn’t mean that each and every film is screamingly funny because, as I’ve just explained, mere laughter is for chumps. In my view the better comedies are often heh-heh funny or even no-laugh funny (i.e., Elaine May‘s Ishtar). A great comedy has to be on to something greater than itself (which means it could qualify as a dramedy), and it has to measure up as a first-rate, well-grounded, reality-reflecting film if you take out the humor. Or, failing that, it has to be completely, absurdly silly (i.e., Duck Soup or Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily). And it can never be twee (i.e., forget anything by Jacques Tati) or star Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams (i.e., forget Three Amigos, Mrs. Doubtfire, Anchorman) And even if it’s no-laugh funny, it can’t make you want to walk out or change the channel (i.e., forget Withnail & I).

That said and in no particular order…

(1) Three-way tie for #1: Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day, Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove, Joel & Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski; (2) Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg; (3) Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot; (4) Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, (5 & 6) Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America & Modern Romance; (7) Bobby and Peter Farrelly‘s There’s Something About Mary; (8) Howard Hawks‘ Bringing Up Baby, (9) Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate; (10) Woody Allen‘s Manhattan, (11, 12 & 13) James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets; (14) Stephen Frears‘ High Fidelity; (15 & 16) Preston Sturges‘ The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels; (17) Larry Charles‘ Borat; (18) Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, (19) Ben Stiller‘s The Cable Guy, (19) Charles Crichton‘s A Fish Called Wanda, (20) The early ’30s Laurel & Hardy films as an aggregate, (21) Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop, (20, 21 & 22) Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and The Producers, (23) Buster Keaton‘s The General, (24) Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids, (25) Early ’30s Marx Brothers’ trio as an aggregate — Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, A Day At The Races, (26) Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, (27) Sydney Pollack‘s Tootsie, (28) John Hughes‘ Plains, Trains & Automobiles, (29) the afore-mentioned Ishtar and (30) What’s Up Tiger Lily?.

A strange moment for me in Manarola, 3:35 am and unable to sleep, having woken at 2:30 am after dropping off for a 30-minute nap around 8 pm. I’m now sitting in a tiny stone foyer with no wall plugs, no lights….just a round plastic table and two plastic beach chairs. In the dark.

Manarola’s sea vistas are stunning and nourishing, of course, and I love the constant sound of crashing, pounding surf below.  But otherwise this is an amiable but second-rate, hand-to-mouth tourist town, and by that I mean catering almost entirely to under-30 types as older folks have apparently been scared off by the steep staircases. I for one bounded up via Belvedere like an antelope. Actually I’m lying — the stairs are a bitch.

Local merchants, their survival requiring a constant seduction of 20somethings and their modest incomes, have made Manarola into a tourist destination for this subset — young couples, backpackers, student groups, families on a budget. Our little place, located up high with a breathtaking view, cost me a couple of hundred per night, but most of the hotels are cheaper. 

The ristorantes, trattorias and osterias have struck me as nothing special (good enough, reasonably priced), but there doesn’t seem to be anything that even begins to resemble La Lampara. Plus there isn’t a decent small market in the area.

Whenever a vacation town has a great, drop-dead selling point that everyone will succumb to (smashing surf, an eye-filling horizon), the locals never try to build it into anything more.  Because they don’t have to and they know it. 

Ten years ago Jett and I visited Monterosso, which is larger with a few more resources and a small beach. I think I prefer that Cinque Terre town to this one.

A note to Luca Guadagnino, typed around 3:30 am: “Thanks to you and Guipy for the wonderful three-hour lunch, which Tatyana and I will never, ever forget. I’m very sorry we couldn’t manage to visit your palazzo in Crema. La Lampara was a truly perfect setting, homey and simple, an exquisite little family business, etc. Our lunch was private, of course, but I feel I have to at least minimally account for my whereabouts on Sunday. So I’ll be mentioning that we met and lunched, and that the great-looking Call Me By Your Name poster will be out soon, and also that great line about ‘family’ and perhaps a mention of how Rio, the Jake Gyllenhaal-Benedict Cumberbatch thriller you’ll be shooting next year, will actually be shot in Sri Lanka, etc. Thanks so much again. A truly lovely interlude. Thanks for everything. Catch you again during the early fall festivals.”

Luca Guadagnino at La Lampara — Sunday, 6.4, 4:15 pm.

During Sunday’s sublime outdoor lunch at La Lampara, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino mentioned a kind of selling point about his brilliant film, which premiered to ecstatic raves during last January’s Sundance Film Festival and which Sony Pictures Classics will open on 11.24 — about as Oscar-baity a release date as you can get.

Call Me By Your Name is, yes, a first-love film, an early ’80s gay romance and a sensual, laid-back Italian summer dreamscape. But it connects in a more fundamental way, Luca said and which I fully agree with, with family values, which is to say father-son values, extended-family values, community values…we’re all together in this.

For the film is not so much about a one-on-one relationship (although that is certainly a central thread) as much as how the hearts and minds of a small, mostly English-speaking community in northern Italy (the film was primarily shot in Guadagnino’s home town of Crema) observe, absorb, feed into, comment upon and nourish in little affecting ways the central, slow-build love story between Timothy Chalamet and Armie Hammer. You could describe the basic dynamic along the lines of “you guys are engaged in an emotional adventure but we’re also involved in a sense because we’re family and we care.”

Posted by Esquire‘s Tyler Coates on 1.26.17: “First loves are the hardest to shake, as evidenced in the film’s closing moments. Never before has a movie treated an inevitable loss with such dignity and beauty, both through a stunning monologue delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Elio’s father, and a final, several-minute-long shot of Elio’s face as he contemplates his summer romance and, surely, what it means for the future. We may know what happens next — Eliot will surely love again — but Guadagnino places the most importance on the present, an emotional limbo full of sadness and joy, grief and hope.

“It’s enough to erase all of the movies you’ve loved before, as it’s impossible not to feel seduced and broken by what Guadagnino pulls off. The film will leave you devastated, but the memory of its exuberant 130 minutes will last a lifetime.”

It’s 5:10 am right now, and I’m sitting in a pitch-dark, no-wall-outlet foyer in a Manarola rooming house (laughingly referred to as a kind of “hotel” but not in my book), the only light coming from the unplugged Macbook Pro and with the Mediterranean surf smashing and churning outside.

With the exception of a delightful four-person, three-hour lunch with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Gudagnino at La Lampara, a coastal restaurant outside La Spezia, I spent almost all of Sunday driving and searching for parking and dragging suitcases up steep stone staircases, and then taking a brief nap at 8 pm only to awake six and half hours later.

Which is partly why, at this juncture, I’ve almost nothing to say about the forthcoming, four-night Putin Interviews (Showtime, 6.12, 9 pm). I’m racing to finish three or four posts before the computer battery dies, and the wifi sucks and my ass hurts from sitting on a shitty little plastic chair.

Will the always interesting Oliver Stone go easy on the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, a skillfully deceptive alpha male who — be honest — commands a thoroughly corrupt government, has almost certainly had journalists and enemies killed, has suppressed free speech and will continue to do so, still supports the fiendish Assad regime? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s safe to say Stone probably won’t be as flinty as Megyn Kelly was during her recent conversation with Putin. I’m presuming that the Stone-Putin thing will be somewhat more interesting, at least in terms of a potential cat-and-mouse dynamic, Stone asking or not asking certain questions and Putin dodging like a champ either way.

Last night Tatyana and I dropped by Pierluigi (Piazza de’ Ricci, 144, 00186 Roma), a pricey, world-class eatery that attracts elite natives and travellers. We had no reservation but were graciously seated right away, and as I unfolded my napkin I realized we were 30 inches from Michelle Williams and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who’ve been going out for a couple of years.

Right away I started calculating what my next move should be, if any.

Michelle Williams, Jonathan Safran Foer.

A go-getter movie journalist of the first order would have definitely said hello, chatted them up for 45 to 60 seconds and asked Michelle (a) how The Greatest Showman is shaping up and (b) what’s up with the Janis Joplin biopic that, unless I’ve missed something, she’s supposed to begin shooting fairly soon.

Has this Amazon-funded project gone south? I was asking myself this because Michelle doesn’t look like Joplin right now. Like, at all. Her tennis-ball-length hair is snow white (just like Kristen Stewart‘s) and she’s also rail-thin. If she were going to play The Jop anytime soon wouldn’t you think she’d be a tiny bit fuller and fleshier (Joplin wasn’t heavy but she drank a lot and was no health-club Nazi) and rocking a longish ’60s do?

But I also feel that couples who are simply together in a four-star restaurant in a beautiful city like Rome should be left alone. Or at least part of me believes this. They were just eating and chatting and love-birding. Toward the end of their light meal they were holding hands. The bottom line is that I wimped out and said nothing. On one hand I feel funny about this, but on the other I feel good.

Texts to Tatyana about 90 seconds after we sat down: “Don’t turn around.” “Don’t react.” “You remember Manchester By The Sea?” “Don’t look” “To your left.” “Michelle Williams.” “A sideways glance is okay — just don’t turn in your seat.”

From Ryan Lizza‘s New Yorker piece, “How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job,” dated 6.2:

“Just as [Steve] Bannon seemed to reach a low point in his relationship with Trump, [Jared] Kushner’s role in the Russia probe emerged as the most important piece of White House intrigue. Kushner, though he didn’t have the title, was the Trump campaign’s de-facto campaign manager. He was at Trump’s side through the eras of Roger Stone, Carter Page and Paul Manafort. And more important, as we learned last Friday, Kushner was working closely with Flynn, during the transition, on his dealings with the Russians, and he has attracted a similar level of interest from the F.B.I.

“The second change since Bannon’s low point was that a decision on whether to withdraw from the Paris climate accord finally needed to be made. It was the most important fight pitting Bannon against Jared and Ivanka yet. And it played to all of Bannon’s strengths. The first Trump adviser described Kushner and Ivanka as ‘more or less Trump’s conscience,’ and as ‘more pragmatic, a little less ideological,’ or perhaps ‘multi-ideological.’ Bannon, he said, ‘speaks to Trump’s id.’

“A third Trump adviser, more closely aligned with the Bannon faction, was less charitable. ‘I think Jared and Ivanka are concerned with being accepted in the right places, they care about what the beautiful people think,’ he said. ‘They care about being well received in the Upper West Side cocktail parties. They view Steve as a man with dirty fingernails, with some weird, crazy, extremist philosophy they don’t think is in the best interest of the President.

“With all respect to them, they don’t understand how Trump got elected. They don’t understand the forces behind it, they don’t understand the dynamics of the situation, and they certainly don’t understand his appeal and the people who voted for him ** — they can’t understand it.” He added, “They would like the President to be more like George Bush: one-dimensional, predictable, neocon, mainstream.”

** rural and rust-belt dumbshits, marginally educated if that, Fox News-watching, the dregs of 21st Century society.

Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express is, of course, set aboard an elegant, first-class train chugging through Europe but also, like the original Agatha Christie thriller, in the early 1930s. Among the elite, well-heeled travellers is an African American doctor (i.e., “Dr. Arbuthnot”), played by Hamilton Tony Award-winner Leslie Odom Jr.. This is a completely accurate and representative bit of casting for the time period, of course. I can’t imagine why Alfred Hitchcock didn’t include a black physician character when he cast The Lady Vanishes (’38). As I understand it early ’30s Europe was teeming with wealthy, refined, richly educated black dudes.

Seriously: Just as Hamilton reimagined America’s 18th Century founders and architects as non-white and non-European, Branagh has decided to reimagine the Christie realm, at least in this one respect.

Amir Bar Lev‘s Long Strange Trip, which I’ve tried to persuade everyone to see, is now streamable as a six-part series via Amazon. From 4.13 riff: “Long Strange Trip is more about what happened within — creatively among the band members, managers and hangers-on, and particularly among the Deadhead throngs in the ’80s — than any kind of rote, surface-y rundown of their performing and recording history (this happened, that happened). Act One (’65 to ’71 or thereabouts) is a good, comprehensive mid-to-late-’60s history lesson — efficient, amusing, well-honed. But Act Two (or the last two hours) really brings it home. This is where the heart is, what turned the light on — the thing that told me what Amir Bar Lev is really up to.”