For some reason I’ve been obsessed for years with Marilyn Monroe‘s walled-off home at 12305 5th Helena Drive, right off Carmelina Ave. in Brentwood. She died there, of course. Built in 1929, it may be the most serene-looking Spanish-style home I’ve ever laid eyes on. I adore the pool and the indoor amber lighting just after dusk. That or I’m some kind of nostalgia queen who can’t help investing in her remnants. I drop by every couple of years around dusk and peer over the wall. Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller is reporting that the place is for sale for $6.9 million. Monroe probably didn’t pay much more than $50K when she bought it in ’61 or thereabouts. Miller says the owner never lived in the home — they just bought it in order to flip it. I hate people like that.

There’s this tendency among web designers to use large-point-size type and acres of white space. I really hate this, and this morning I told good friend Sasha that Hollywood Elsewhere’s redesign will not follow the Babar and Celeste thematic approach. This was three or four hours ago, mind. We’ve since moved past the Babar-and-Celeste thing but for a while there I was very concerned. I’m sorry but web design disputes make me emotional.

“I do not want and will not stand for a Hollywood Elsewhere designed for four year-olds — readers who need the point sizes to be gargantuan and web pages that revel in acres and acres of pointless white space.

“I want the copy and point sizes of the new Hollywood Elsewhere (which was created to make it feel less ‘old’ and revitalize advertising and make the site load faster) to look sensible and balanced and elegant. I don’t want it downgraded. I want it to look handsome and balanced and respectfully old-world in the sense that N.Y. Times or Forbes or Vulture copy looks, or how the current HE looks. I hate how it looks now.

“The old (current) HE is unremarkable but palatable — the point size of headlines and copy are okay — they don’t leap out but are at least proportionate, unchallenging and sensible. If they seem too small, the reader can use his/her fingers to increase image size. The current redesigned version looks awful on mobile. The headline point size is gargantuan. And the general copy point size is also too big. It looks like a child’s reading book.

The shrieking laughter of people enjoying brunch next door is interfering with my concentration. I’m listening to one woman in particular, and it’s like someone is pointing a gun at her head and threatening to shoot if she stops laughing. Except she’s a really good actress and pulling it off. But you can’t help saying to yourself, “What on God’s earth could possibly be that funny?”  

A person who continues to laugh and laugh like some giddy hyena, louder and louder by the minute, almost certainly isn’t enjoying anyone’s humor — she doing this out of form of nervous desperation. She’s trying to flatter someone or emphasize how spirited she is or something.

If I was telling hyena girl a funny story and she started in with the hyper giggling, I would stop and smile and pat her on the shoulder and say, “Okay, okay…you’re good.” Then I’d lean forward and look in her eyes and say, “Uhhm, you know it’s not that funny….right?”

Katherine Waterston was the hot new actress du jour when she popped three years ago in Inherent Vice. For better or worse, the sex scene in that film put her on the map. Then she landed a supporting role in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which I refused to even see. And then Ridley Scott or somebody on his team persuaded Waterston to wear a butchy haircut for her role in Alien: Convenant (20th Century Fox, 5.12), and suddenly the internets were saying “wait, wait..what happened?” This is the most confounding, throughly de-glamorizing haircut any name-brand actress had submitted to since Keri Russell chopped her hair off for Season #2 of Felicity. Remember how tough and take-charge Sigourney Weaver was in the original Alien, but how she didn’t jettison her hetero allure?

Katherine Waterston in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant

Waterston in Inherent Vice.

“Fuck Mars…this is it.” Until last night I didn’t know that colonizing Mars was even half a thing. I hadn’t paid much attention…uhhm, since reading last October about Leonardo DiCaprio wanting to travel to the red planet on one of Elon Musk‘s SpaceX vehicles.

I wrote a while back that I wouldn’t be polluting my soul with a viewing of The Fate of the Furious. Because I like real fast-car movies (Bullitt, Drive, both versions of Gone in Sixty Seconds) and am therefore burdened with a sense of taste in this realm. And because I’ve suffered through three Fast & Furious films, and the only one I could half-stand was Rob Cohen’s 2001 original. Vomit bag.

Today’s news about Fate having topped $900 million worldwide is yet another indication of the coarsening of 21st Century culture. The people who paid to see this have done their part to ensure that hundreds of gallons of Vin Diesel sewage will be pumped into megaplexes for God knows how many more years. As a cultural omen this is almost as dark as the election of Donald Trump and the 9/11 attacks. The animals have taken over the asylum.

“If the fate of the Furious series is to grow somehow both wearier and dumber with age, then the eighth film is proof of a mission firmly accomplished.” — from a recent review by Globe & Mail‘s Barry Hertz.

The great Steven Soderbergh is back from his Frank Sinatra-styled retirement, which was basically a recharge. In a chat with Entertainment Weekly‘s Kevin P. Sullivan he talks about Logan Lucky (Bleecker, Fingerprint Releasing, 8.18) and his plans to self-distribute:

Logan Lucky costars Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, Adam Driver.

“On the most obvious level, Logan Lucky was the complete inversion of an Ocean’s movie,” Soderbergh says. “It’s an anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie. Nobody dresses nice. Nobody has nice stuff. They have no money. They have no technology. It’s all rubber-band technology, and that’s what I thought was fun about it. It seemed familiar to me, but different enough. The landscape, the characters and the canvas were the complete opposite of an Ocean’s film. This is a version of an Ocean’s movie that’s up on cement blocks in your front yard.”

I’m betting that a majority of your megaplex douche nozzles want people in a heist film to dress nice, have nice stuff, nice technology, be flush, drive cool cars, etc. They like their meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Not me — I love what Soderbergh is describing here — but nothing makes mainstreamers more uncomfortable than originality.

I’ve mentioned two or three times that back in the early ’70s I played drums in a band that was alternately called The Golden Rockets, The Sludge Brothers, Dog Breath and Blind Pig Sweat. At the very best I was semi-competent. Style-wise I used to remind myself of Doug Clifford, the Creedence Clearwater drummer. I never got beyond that, and I tended to drag at times. I never took drumming lessons and could never even do a roll. To this day I can’t manage this with sticks, and that’s very irritating.

If only I’d taken lessons as a kid, but either way I was a mediocrity and knew it. It was always a little painful when we did a gig because I knew that a certain percentage of the crowd would be shaking their heads and muttering “whoa, that guy isn’t too good.” But I’ve always been a better-than-decent thigh drummer. No shame in that regard. I use dimes and quarters in my right pocket so simulate a high-hat sound. 

If I lived in a big soundproof McMansion I’d buy one of those electronic silent drum sets that you can only hear with earphones and wail away at odd hours.

The best gig of my life has been writing Hollywood Elsewhere for the last 12 and 2/3 years, and especially since I adopted the several-posts-per-day format in April ’06. The second best was tapping out two columns per week for Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com and Kevin Smith‘s Movie Poop Shoot (’98 to ’04). General entertainment journalism for major publications (Entertainment Weekly, People, Los Angeles Times, N.Y. Times), which I did from ’78 to ’98, ranks third. But my fourth all-time favorite job was driving for Checker Cab in Boston. Seriously. The only non-writing gig I ever really liked.

The gig only lasted eight or nine months. I was canned for driving a regular customer off the meter up in Revere. But God, I felt so connected and throbbing and all the other cliches. Buzzing around one of the greatest cities in the world each night, learning something new every day, meals on the fly, incidents and accidents, hints and allegations.

At the end of every shift I was so revved that it always took a good hour to crash when I got home, which was usually around 1:30 or 2 am. And every night I had a new story to tell my girlfriend, Sherry McCoy, with whom I was sharing a nice little pad on Park Drive.

Back then the Checker garage was on Lansdowne Street, or right next to Fenway Park. I remember to this day my Motorola two-way radio with the cord-attached mike. One of the dispatchers was called Tiny (a white-haired fat guy); there was another older gent with a kindly face and gentle voice. After I had gained a little seniority I was given a slick new Checker cab (#50), which I always kept whistle-clean. At the end of every shift I had a new story to tell.

Story #1: A youngish woman who got into the back seat near Boston Garden found a full wallet with no ID or anything — $400 and change, which was a fortune back then. We split the dough 50-50 — luckiest score of my young life.

Story #2: An attractive, slender, frosty-haired woman in her mid to late 40s started chatting about this and that, and before you knew it were were flirting and talking about erotic chemistry and whatnot. As I was dropping her off she opened the cash slot and we gently kissed goodbye. We never got out of the cab, never shook hands — all in the eyes. I saw her on Newbury Street three or four months later…”Yo!”

Four and a half months before anyone besides Glenn Whipp starts to even speculate about 2017 Best Picture candidates, Hollywood Elsewhere is projecting that the following nine films (also posted in the Oscar Balloon) are the most likely contenders, and in the following preferential order:

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Detroit, written by Mark Boal; Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics); Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.25); Steven Spielberg‘s “Untitled Pentagon Papers’ Project” (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks — 20th Century Fox, 12.22); Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22); Paul Thomas Anderson‘s semi-fictionalized biopic about legendary egomaniacal fashion designer Charles James; Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (Weinstein Co., 12.22); Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.19); and Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17).

Are there any hints of softness or uncertainty among any of these? Yes, but I’d rather not share at this stage. I only have hunches and what are those worth? Which of the above are all-but-guaranteed locks for Best Picture noms? Detroit, Call Me By Your Name, The Greatest Showman, Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers Project (a.k.a. The Post). Everything else feels a bit shaky in this or that way.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that 20th Century Fox will release Steven Spielberg‘s “untitled Pentagon Papers drama” platform-style on 12.22.17 with a nationwide expansion on 1.12.18 — obviously a declaration that Fox expects it to be a Best Picture contender. Lang is referring to The Post, which is what Deadline‘s Michael Fleming called the project in a 3.10 report.

Soon after I read a recent draft of Liz Hannah‘s script and posted an assessment. I called it engaging and well-written but more of a “middle-aged woman’s self-empowerment saga” than any kind of Spotlight or All The President’s Men-type deal.

Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, exec editor Ben Bradlee in the early ’70s.

Lang seems to be reporting that Spielberg, producer Amy Pascal and 20th Century Fox don’t like the title of Hannah’s script and are looking to invent something catchier. That or some kind of copyright issue has come into play.

Lang also reports that the film is “rumored” to star Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in the two lead roles — i.e., the late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and its scrappy editor during the ’70s heyday, the late Ben Bradlee. Fleming wasn’t ambivalent about Streep and Hanks’ participation — he said they were flat-out on the team and “clearing their schedules” in order to start production in late May.

Lang notes that the “Spielberg Pentagon Papers project” will now join other presumed 2017 Best Picture headliners like Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War (i.e., Thomas Edison vs. George Westinghouse over plans to generate electricity for the public)

For whatever reason Lang decided not to include Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit and Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name in his prognosis.

For years I’ve been moaning and groaning about the James Gray cabal — a fraternity of elite critics, cultureburg foo-foos and film festival staffers who’ve sworn by Gray‘s films for years, and for reasons that to me have always seemed thin or specious. It’s not Gray’s films that have gotten in my craw as much as the constant overpraise.

James Gray (safari hat, beard, earphones) directing The Lost City of Z with Charlie Hunnam. Why isn’t Gray rocking the short sleeve T-shirted look that the crew guy is wearing? He looks like a tourist who’s been asked to step off the Jungle Safari boat in Disneyland, especially with that fanny pack and those long khaki sleeves. If you’re going to wear a safari hat you need to go cowboy style (i.e., Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now). And if not that, a standard-issue director’s baseball cap.

I was actually okay with (i.e., not disturbed or offended by) Gray’s New York-centric films for nearly 20 years — Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own The Night, Two Lovers and Blood Ties (a fraternal crime thriller written by Gray but directed by Guillaume Canet).

But The Immigrant was mostly a drag (“A well-made, respectably authentic period drama, but the pace is slow and the story ho-hums…I must have looked at my watch six or seven times”) and The Lost City Of Z was, I felt, all but impossible. I wanted to escape less than 30 minutes in but I was with a paying audience at Alice Tully Hall and felt I had to stick it out. It was hell.

Yesterday MCN’s David Poland filed a piece largely in league with my views, not just about his frustrations with Gray but also the cabal.

Excerpt #1: “I don’t get it. And now, six features into James Gray’s directing career, I think I am done apologizing for it. My experience of Gray’s films has been, consistently, ‘great acting…why doesn’t the story work?’ And yet, some of the smartest critics I know are true devotees of everything Gray does. They must be hip to something that I’m not seeing, right?”