While promoting Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story yesterday, Susan Sarandon explained the Hollywood casting basics. “In my business it’s all about your sexual currency,” she said. “People hire women they want to be with and men they want to be, and anyone who falls in between is a character actor.”

What Sarandon didn’t acknowledge (and this is not new for HE regulars) is that sexual currency standards have significantly changed over the last decade or so, and that the principal change-agent in this shifting landscape has been Judd Apatow. Producers and directors will always “hire women they want to be with,” but the guys they want to be used to be traditional or at least semi-traditional leading-man types, and now (and roughly since Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin) they’re not.

Here’s how I put it on 8.15.14: “Guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl. And girls who attracted a lot of guys used to look like girls who attracted a lot of guys. But no longer. By today’s standards any homely, marginal, bearded or overfed guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash.

“Blubbery Seth Rogen getting lucky with and impregnating Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up…uh-huh. Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? The bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness…right. Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable. The obviously desirable Anna Kendrick and Keira Knightley finding dweeby twee-male Mark Webber attractive and beddable in Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Joe Swanberg‘s Happy Christmas…huh?”

“In short, Apatow’s rules of attraction have been sinking in for years and we’re all buying it.

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Nothing makes my blood run colder than to read the words “much richer grain textures” in a DVD Beaver Bluray review. But that’s what it says in Gary W. Tooze‘s assessment of Criterion’s forthcoming Bluray (4.17) of Leo McCarey‘s The Awful Truth.

That’s pretty damn close to Tooze’s assessment of Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray (“it has more, and consistent, grain”), and I’ve learned through hard experience what this actually means. Tooze also reports that the Awful Truth Bluray “looks wonderfully film-like“…good God.

CU of DVD Beaver frame capture of Criterion’s Awful Truth Bluray, streeting on 4.17.18

I bought Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray and discovered that it’s “completely smothered in digital grain mosquitos,” as I said in a 1.13.17 review. “I kept thinking to myself ‘poor Ralph Bellamy, playing that poor dope from Albany and having to sit there and suffer as those billions of mosquitoes crawl all over his head and neck and hair, not to mention Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and all the rest besieged by the same swarm.”

This plus the DVD Beaver screen captures of the Awful Truth disc show that this 1937 screwball classic has been grainstormed to a fare-thee-well.

I’ve said it 10,000 times, but I don’t like heavy grain. No one does except for grain monks (i.e., perverse aficionados) like Tooze. Call me a plebian but I prefer my older black-and-white films to be tastefully DNR’ed — I want them to look as sharp, clean, unfiltered and un-muddied as possible, and that means no swarms of Egyptian mosquitoes covering each and every frame.

Ditto.

Right now (i.e., the post-Oscar season blahs) would be a great time for A24 to release Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, which everyone went nuts for six months ago. March, April and May films have always lacked nutritional value; it would be wonderful to settle into Schrader’s best film in years right now. Alas, First Reformed won’t open until 6.22.

From my 9.1.17 review: “First Reformed, a spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption, is completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy. But in a good way.

“On top of which it’s been shot in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which itself is cause for modest celebration.

“I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fully felt, disciplined, well–ordered film by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says ‘Hah…I never left!’

“First Reformed is so Schraderian, so moralistic in almost a Travis Bickle kind of way, so tortured and yet fully engrossing. Everyone has been calling it Taxi Driver meets Diary of a Country Priest with a little Hardcore and Rolling Thunder thrown in.

“Set in upstate New York, it’s Reverent Toller (Ethan Hawke), an ex-military chaplain turned small-town minister, who gradually succumbs to the idea — don’t laugh or recoil — of moral absolutism by way of becoming a suicide bomber.

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One reason that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is okay with meeting President Donald Trump next May, I suspect, is that they’re peas in a pod — a pair of overweight, cult-of-personality authoritarians who have reflexively turned to bluster when challenged — and that a certain form of blowhard-to-blowhard, asshole-to-asshole, takes-one-to-know-one communication will probably kick in.

That’s probably the instinctual motive on both sides, come to think of it.

What may result is another matter. There’s ample cause for skepticism. A 3.9 N.Y. Times analysis piece by Max Fischer (“7 Big Things to Understand About Trump’s Talks With North Korea”) covers most of the bases.

Korea-watcher Jeffrey Lewis c/o Middlebury Institute of International Studies: “Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons. He’s inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”

From a 3.9 Economist piece, “The Pros and Cons of a Summit Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un”:

“Skeptics are also right to fear that Mr Trump — a man who boasts about his television ratings, and who is bored by briefings and scornful of foreign alliances — could end up being played like a gold-plated violin.

“There is nothing new about a North Korean despot proposing a meeting with an American president, or expressing warm words about denuclearization in return for security guarantees, by which the Kim regime usually means the withdrawal of American troops from the Korean peninsula and the breaking of treaty alliances with South Korea and Japan.”

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I wouldn’t see Nash Edgerton‘s Gringo with a knife at my back, no offense, and I’m starting to think I might be better off not seeing Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. This adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s Y.A. fable smelled like trouble months ago. I’ve written that I “missed” my only chance to attend a Wrinkle screening last week, but the truth is that I was terrified of submitting to it and so I decided (with some domestic pressure) to attend J.J. Abrams‘ Oscar Wilde party instead. No regrets.

John Hughes and Nick Castle‘s Dennis The Menace (’93) wasn’t much but the bathroom-torture scene [below] was laugh-out-loud when I saw it at an all-media screening, and it just made me laugh again. The key moment comes at 2:01, when Walter Matthau‘s Mr. Wilson drinks the reconstituted mouthwash, and then, at 2:37, squeezes the spiked nasal spray into his nostrils. And he howls and dunks his head, etc.

The brilliant stroke comes a split second later with a wide shot of Wilson’s home, and you hear him howl again as a neighborhood dog does the same. Right at that instant the movie is saying to the audience, “We don’t care about this cranky old man in his new striped pajamas…all we want to do is fuck with this guy and make fun of his pain…listen to him!” Somehow the cruelty of this attitude, obviously embraced by Hughes and Castle, translates into funny.

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2018 is delivering a cinematic boost to the legend of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, first with Betsy West and Julie Cohen‘s RBG (Magnolia, 5.4) and then Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex (Focus Features, fall), a biographical drama about Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) and judicial career and her late husband Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer).

“Witch. Monster. Evil-doer. Zombie. In RBG, a survey of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s impact on American law, documentary co-directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West open with a montage of insults endured by the 84-year-old judge.

“Audiences for this peppy portrait will dissent. To young fans who’ve slapped Ginsburg’s face on T-shirts, coffee mugs and a million memes, she’s a hero, icon, and rebel, the queen of the judicial branch better known for Kate McKinnon’s Saturday Night Live impersonation than her hard-fought feminist victories.

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I should have mentioned this yesterday, but the decision by Oscar telecast producers Mike DeLuca and Jennifer Todd to omit Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone from the death reel was a stunner. Malone was iconic in the ’50s and ’60s — what were they thinking? Even if she hadn’t won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as a sexual compulsive in Douglas Sirk‘s Written on the Wind (’57), Malone’s book-store scene with Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (’46) would have more than sufficed.

These plus her performances in Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (’57), Andrew Stone‘s The Last Voyage, Robert Aldrich‘s The Last Sunset (’61) and her Constance MacKenzie character on ABC’s Peyton Place series from ’64 to ’69….c’mon.

Why are some Hollywood luminaries included in the death reel and others ignored? The process seems haphazard and arbitrary.

Deluca and Todd could have made up this year for excluding Bill Paxton (who passed on 2.25.17) in last year’s death reel, but naahhh.

They also blew off Powers Boothe, Adam West, Glen Campbell, Robert Guillaume, David Cassidy, Fats Domino (although they included Chuck Berry), Hugh Hefner and Jim Nabors.

They included Jeanne Moreau but without a dialogue clip or brief image montage. On both sides of the Atlantic Moreau was a thriving legend in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s. Orson Welles (yeah, I know…who?) once called her “the greatest actress in the world,” and her sepia-toned image appeared for less than two effing seconds?

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My first profoundly negative response to the physical and spiritual being known as Joaquin Phoenix happened three and a half years ago, during a New York Film Festival screening of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice (’14). I decided right away that his (or more precisely author ThomasPynchon‘s) Larry “Doc” Sportello, a mutton-chopped, sandal-wearing private detective, was mostly a lazy collection of slumbering mannerisms — slurry speech, lackadaisical manner, etc.

Then came Phoenix’s pot-bellied New England professor in Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (’15) and again I said to myself, “I don’t like this guy…this is another Phoenix-playing-Phoenix performance…do I really have to hang with him?”

And then in Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene, Pheonix played the first graybeard, seen-better-days Jesus in motion picture history — a Nazarene who looks at least 47 or 48 years old, or roughly 15 years older than the Real McCoy was when he died on Calvary — and again I went “Oh, Jesus effing Christ…here we go again.”

So it really means something when I say that Phoenix’s sullen, barely verbal performance as a graybeard dadbod in Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here (Amazon, 4.6) didn’t bother me that much. Because the film is so good.

You Were Never Really Here wasn’t just the strongest film I saw in Park City — half narrative, half fever-dream — but the first intensely distinctive, high-style art film to open in 2018.

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