British recording artist George Michael, whom I honestly haven’t thought a great deal about since a certain 1998 incident hit the news wires, has passed at age 53. Why did he ascend at such a relatively young age? There are indications in the “Personal Life” section of Michaels’ Wikipedia page that drug use might have had something to do with it. Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, Michael was a busker on the London underground train system before forming Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981. A statement in a Guardian article says Michael died “peacefully” at his home in Oxfordshire, England.

What’s the one Christmas muzak standard you always hear playing on loop inside retail stores coast to coast, starting around Thanksgiving and never ceasing until New Years’ Day? Editor’s note: My posting this video doesn’t suggest that I’ve backed off on my belief that Jimmy Fallon played a small but significant role in helping Donald Trump get elected. He did, and as far as I’m concerned he’ll never live it down.

I haven’t posted the one-armed piccolo player scene from Robert Altman‘s California Split (’74) in nearly five years. It last appeared on 1.17.12. There are tens of thousands who’ve never seen this, I’m sure.

Around noon today Debbie Reynolds tweeted that daughter Carrie Fisher is in “stable” condition and therefore presumably out of the woods, at least for now. Fisher suffered a serious heart attack two days ago on a London-to-LAX flight. By the way: Check out this page from Fisher’s Empire Strikes Back script (dated 3.19.79) and note the improvements to the dialogue that she wrote, most of which were used for the film. Fisher obviously had a knack for honing superfluous dialogue and adding flavor.

Link to larger page view

Warner Bros. publicity managed to manipulate this Casablanca publicity still to make it seem as if Humphrey Bogart was heftier than costar Ingrid Bergman. No way was Bogart’s head this big compared to Bergman’s. The 5’9″ Bergman was actually taller than Bogart by two inches, and could have probably taken him in a wrestling match. The below group shot attempted an even more radical resizing.

(L. to r.) Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Bergman, Bogart.

Monday Update: Whoda thunk it? Passengers, by any yardstick a serious underperformer, surged on Sunday and now has a five-day tally of $30 million and change. It could rack up another $4 or $5 million today for a grand six-day total of $34 or $35 million — roughly $10 million shy of expectations but a slightly less embarassing performance.

Sunday, 12.25: Morten Tyldum and Jon Spaihts‘ Passengers looked like a tank almost immediately, and the fact that it had only made $11,825,201 after three days of play (12.21 thru 12.23) indicated a serious shortfall. On 12.22 Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro wrote that Passengers had to bring in “$45 to $50 million in its first six days” to maintain a respectable pose. (I’m told that two weeks ago the Sony release was actually tracking to hit $55 million within the first six.)

This morning’s Deadline update projects a four-day tally of $19.3 to $20 million and grand six-day total of $26.6 to $28 million. At best that’s $17 million short of the 12.22 D’Allesandro projection. Passengers, face it, is a dead herring in the moonlight, certainly in relation to cost.

If Tyldum, Spaihts and Sony execs had taken the post-mortem advice of Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich and gone with his alternate ending (i.e., Chris Pratt heroically dies in Act Three and then a year or two later Jennifer Lawrence realizes that she needs to wake someone up herself to avoid a lifetime of solitude), the film would at least have a rich ironic ending, and this might have turned the whole ship around.

Happy Holidays dear ones! Who gives the best hugs in your family? That should be a contest you win. Practice makes perfect 😉🎄#MerryChristmas pic.twitter.com/IT6LdSauqe

— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) December 25, 2016

A Christmas statement released by RNC chair and Donald Trump henchman Reince Priebus exploded three or four hours ago.

“Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind,” the statement by Priebus and RNC co-chair Sharon Day said. “Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.”

Call me deluded or partisan, but the second sentence clearly contains a reference to a “new,” present-day king — i.e., Orange orangutan.

Let’s break it down, shall we? The phrase “Just as the three wise men did on that night” obviously refers to the night Yeshua of Nazareth was allegedly born in Bethlehem, or 2016 years ago. And so “this Christmas” — i.e., the one everyone is celebrating or acknowledging right now, and I mean here in the good old USA — “heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.” There’s no way Yeshua can be considered a “new” king, brah — he’s classic rock, an oldie but goodie, a centuries-old myth.

Let’s also say a prayer of compassion for those poor, deprived souls across the globe and the seas of time whose cultures never embraced Christianity or who personally never bought into it, and therefore lived their sad, barren lives without the faintest hope of salvation.

And what’s with the capitalizing of “K” in “king”?

The all-new Alien Follies with Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride (obviously a dead man), Demián Bichir, Billy Crudup and James Franco. Can we take a vote on a preferred death list? The ones I’d most like to see “get it” (and in this order) are Fassbender, McBride, Waterston. We already know Crudup will be John Hurted. 20th Century Fox will open Alien Convenant on 5.19, or on the third day of the Cannes Film Festival (5.17 to 5.28).

In Judgment at Nuremberg, Marlene Dietrich‘s Madame Bertholt character passes along the following anecdote to Judge Dan Heywood (Spencer Tracy) about defendant Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster):

“I remember there was a reception given for [Richard] Wagner‘s daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Bertholt begins. “Hitler was there. Ernst Janning was there with his wife. She was very beautiful…very small, very delicate. She’s dead now.

“Hitler was quite taken with her. He made advances towards her during the reception. He used to do things like that in a burst of emotion. I will never forget the way Ernst Janning cut him down. I don’t think anybody ever did it to him quite that way. He said, ‘Chancellor…I do not object so much that you are so ill-mannered. I do not object to that so much. I object that you are such a bourgeois.’ Hitler whitened, stared at Janning, and walked out.”

From 12.21 Kevin Sessums post on Facebook: “I was talking to a friend the other night here in New York. She was married for a while to an industrialist with a high social profile in Manhattan, so for much of her marriage she played hostess for parties and dinners at their townhouse and out at their summer estate. We got to talking about the election and how she was coping.

“‘What boggles my mind,’ she said, recalling that marriage and those years of playing New York hostess, ‘is that during all those years the only person I ever insisted on banning from our dinners and our parties — indeed, our very house — was Donald Trump. I just couldn’t put up with his vulgar behavior anymore and you know I don’t have a problem with vulgarity really. But his vulgarity was on a whole other level. The boorish way he groped women at parties and at dinners. He’d even do that thing with me where he’d put an arm around my back and then reach over on the other side to get a feel of my breast. It happened over and over.

Why is one of the truly exceptional, Brando-ish actors of our time starring in a grimy, gunky period series (BBC One in England, FX stateside) about revenge? Why did he make London Road, which nobody even saw much less got excited about? Why did he star in Child 44, which I found suffocating and could barely stay with to the end? Hardy has a thing about playing creepy or sullen fringe characters — I get that — but why doesn’t he ever play a socially liberal attorney who wears suits or a mild-mannered husband having an affair with the next-door neighbor or at least a guy who shaves? Yes, he has a role in Dunkirk (probably a non-pivotal role, given the big-historical-canvas nature of Chris Nolan’s film), but Hardy just doesn’t seem interested in being a leading man, if only to occasionally prove than he can do that sort of thing as well as anyone else if not better. He keeps insisting on playing half-crazy scuzballs, like that guy he played in The Revenant.