Yesterday’s “Greatest Female Villains” post led me to this Fatal Attraction clip, and a realization of how unrealistic and miscalculated Michael Douglas‘s acting is in this scene.

Like any husband who’s indulged in an impulsive weekend affair Douglas would naturally be focused on keeping his wife, played by Anne Archer, in the dark. However angry he might be about finding Glenn Close chatting with her, not getting busted would be absolutely paramount. The normal way to handle this situation would be to play along, be polite, adopt a pleasant demeanor and not give Archer the slightest reason to suspect that something’s up.

But Douglas, performing under the direction of Adrien Lyne, plays it the stupid way. He’s rude and sullen, giving Close a death-ray look and saying as little as possible. In the real world Archer would spot in a second that Douglas and Close not only know each other but that some kind of bad business might have gone down.

Lyne didn’t care about that. He wanted Douglas to echo the same negative emotions that the audience was going through when they saw Close sitting with Archer, and to hell with anything else.

This, in a nutshell, is what mediocre directing and acting are all about. Ignoring recognizable human behavior and focusing on goosing the audience.

The latest HE header logo is the old logo with the photo switched out. I’m fine with this. Site re-designs are traumatic — people always recoil and complain and ask “what was wrong with the original?” — so it’s good to keep the same old thing at the top.

It’s funny, but I don’t think I want to present myself as the Anton Chigurh of Hollywood columnists. I relate a lot more to Josh Brolin‘s No Country For Old Men character. I certainly don’t want to project myself as some kind of fearsome cyclops. The idea is funny, but over and over again it might be a bit much. (This is just a rough idea of how the revised HE logo might look on a regular basis.)

The screenplay for Ingrid Goes West (Neon, 8.4) “adeptly sets the scene for some classic comedy of embarrassment and then sets things in motion smoothly,” says Hollywood Reporter critic Leslie Felperin. “But as whirlwinds are reaped and revelations tumble out, a not-in-a-good-way sourness emerges that makes the last act more unpleasant than perhaps the filmmakers intended.

“Although one wants to praise the screenplay for not spelling everything out, sometimes the characters’ motivations feel just a little too opaque and their decisions seem more motivated by plot mechanics than real human desires.

“On the other hand, that may be exactly the point, and the film might be read as a gloss on how shallow, whimsical and aimless these sort of people are. Certainly, hummingbird-fast editing, courtesy of Jack Price, makes the montages of emojis, hashtags and filtered phone-shot snapshots feel just as hyperactive and dizzying as one would expect, and like social media itself, the final effect is both weirdly entrancing and cloying.”

Last evening the SRO and I were heading east on Montana Avenue when I noticed that a new 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing at the Aero. It was 7:10 pm, or 20 minutes before the show would begin. I excitedly talked her into catching this 1968 classic, as she’d never seen it. So we bought our tickets, got our refreshments, sat down in the third row…and the film looked like dogshit.

Dark, muddy, no focus or sharpness to speak of, all of those exquisite values covered in shadow — a complete rip-off of the patrons who paid $15 a pop.

They were presumably showing the same freshly created 70mm print that’s been playing at the American Cinematheque Egyptian in Hollywood, which means that it probably looked like shit there also. It’s an absolute scandal that that no one’s said anything. All of these 2001 fans, paying crowd after paying crowd, watching one of the inkiest, most under-lighted prints I’ve ever seen, and they’ve all just sat there like sheep.

I went into the lobby and told the staff that the print, or at the very least the projection, was bullshit. “My 2001 Bluray looks glorious on my 65″ Sony 4K, but what you’re showing doesn’t look anywhere near as good,” I said. They reacted like cigar-store Indians. Shocked, fearful.

The manager appeared. “Have you ever seen the 2001 Bluray on a decent high-def screen?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, the Bluray is how it should look — what you’re showing looks like shit.” Manager: “You can’t expect a 70mm print to look like a Bluray…it’s a different thing. It’s celluloid.” Me: “Oh, yeah? I saw a clean 70mm 2001 print at the old Plitt twinplex in Century City back in the mid ’80s, and it looked beautiful. Your print looks like crap.” Manager: “You’re the first person to say anything like this.” Me: “Oh, well, that changes everything! Nobody else complained, you say? That must mean I’m full of shit then!”

I meant to post this over the weekend but didn’t. 20th Century Fox’s Cinemacon presentation happened four days ago, but I have to mention what a knockout it was — a real “That’s Entertainment!” extravaganza complete with singing and dancing and white-glow-rod costumes. What a jolt to see the familiar Fox logo suddenly re-defined by white tubular neon — it took my breath away. I had to share at least this.

I’m reading Michael Callahan‘s Vanity Fair profile of illustrator Robert McGinnis, “The Man Behind History’s Most Iconic Movie Posters, From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to James Bond.” I know the realm — all those ’50s and ’60s-era illustrations of glammy, cartoonishly rail-thin women, often posed with leading men in tuxedos and suede pumps. But the illustration that got me was “Ethan,” which McGinnis painted 37 years ago. McGinnis’s subjects, curiously, are always slimmer and taller. That’s his trademark unreality. The Duke, 48 and bulky when he made The Searchers, is down to his Big Trail weight.

Ten people dead inside St. Petersburg’s Sennaya Ploshchad metro station. Happened around seven hours ago, or sometime after 3 am Pacific. Obviously the work of Swedish terrorists. “I saw a lot of smoke, a crowd making its way to the escalators, people with blood and other people’s insides on their clothes, bloody faces…many were crying,” said St. Petersburg resident Leonid Chaika, who said he was at the station where the blast happened. The motive was probably related to Russia’s anti-ISIS, pro-Hassad aggression in Syria.

What female villains have you completely believed in, and why? I could go on and on about my faves, but the key element is that you believed they weren’t just “playing” villainy but living in caves of their own choosing or creation.

In no particular order: Barbara Stanwyck‘s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Meryl Streep‘s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Jane Greer‘s Kathy Moffet in Out of the Past, Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, Kathy Bates‘ Annie Wilkes in Misery, Louise Fletcher‘s Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Sharon Stone‘s Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct, Bette Davis‘s Baby Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, etc.

I didn’t believe in Margot Robbie‘s Harley Quinn (Suicide Squad) at all. Her performance was all about extreme-playdough mannerisms, posturing, makeup and wardrobe. All I believed was that Robbie had been hired because she’s hot.

I’ll tell you who I believed in 110% — Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The capsule definition of Alex Forrest was that of a manic, lion-haired feminist banshee who tried to leverage a single night of mad, passionate sex with Michael Douglas into a knife or a bomb that would detonate his marriage. But I didn’t really believe in that — that’s what the research-screening audiences saw. What I believed in was Alex’s instability and emotional desperation, and that made her scary. The scariest thing she said was “I won’t be ignored, Dan!”

I’m sorry but I don’t regard Sofia Boutella‘s demonic mummy demon (i.e., a resuscitation of Ahmanet, an Egyptian princess from 5000 years ago) as any kind of scary. One, Boutella’s casting as the mummy was a political sop to notions of gender equality in the film industry. And two, I saw her up close at Cinemacon in Las Vegas and she’s no Charlize Theron (who I would buy as a mummy monster in a New York minute) — Boutella is delicate and modest-sized. I don’t get the threat.

You can say “in a CG spectacle the physical size or gender of the villain doesn’t matter…it’s all in the dark conjurings and wild effects” and I would reply “no, you’re wrong…the performer has to put some kind of chill into your system…you have to accept the idea that the actor or actress villain is harboring some kind of real-deal malevolence or madness on their own dime…you can’t just trot out some attractive French-Algerian actress who’s slender and only 5’5″ tall and say ‘okay, audiences…here’s somebody you should definitely be scared of.'”

Alex Kurtzman and Tom Cruise‘s The Mummy pops on June 9th.

I watched Dr. Zhivago last night for the sake of the SRO, who had only vague memories of it. It had been a few years since my last viewing. Released in late ’65 but seen by most audiences the following year, it will never be more than an eye-filling, handsomely composed soap opera, but it works because of Maurice Jarre‘s haunting score along with David Lean‘s incisive editing style.

My favorite character is Klaus Kinski‘s anarchist on the train, but the most interesting developed character is Tom Courtenay‘s Pasha Antipov (aka “Strelnikov”) and he has…what, five or six scenes? This chat with Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is his best moment:

In the film Rod Steiger‘s Komarovsky tells Yuri that Strelnikov, on the run from the Bolsheviks, was captured five miles from Yuriatin while apparently trying to find Lara, his abandoned wife. He refused to answer to any name but Pasha, and then committed suicide en route to his own execution.

In Boris Pasternak’s 1957 book, Pasha finds only Yuri when he arrives in Yuriatin. From a Wikidot summary: “Yuri and Pasha are both walking dead men, having lost what was most vital to them somewhere along the way. They are Russians though, so they drink and talk hours into the night. Then Yuri goes to bed. Pasha takes a walk, and shoots himself in the head. Yuri finds his corpse in the morning.”

We’re two weeks away from the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rosza, who is currently my favorite classical-styled movie-score composer. I change my allegiance all the time — Bernard Herrmann, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman — but I always come back to Rosza.

A short list of Rozsa’s classic scores — Double Indemnity, Spellbound, The Killers (one of the best noir scores ever), Brute Force, The Naked City, Madame Bovary, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, Lust for Life, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, El Cid. Rosza’s scores performed the required duties (augmenting the moods and themes, intensifying the emotion) but they work on their own terms.

I posted the following about Rosza’s King of Kings score on 12.21.10: “Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.

“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch that Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”