The best talking-head comment in Alexandre Philippe‘s 78/52, a detailed examination and celebration of the slasher shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho, comes from director Peter Bogdanovich. Psycho opened at the DeMille theatre (B’way and 47th) on 6.16.60, and the fledgling journalist and soon-to-be MOMA film programmer was there for the first show. Bodganovich was 20 years old. After it ended he staggered out into the Times Square sunlight: “I felt as if I’d been raped.”

I was intrigued and diverted by 78/52 as far as it went. If you’re any kind of Hitchcock buff it’ll feel like mother’s milk. But the aspect that really got me was Robert Muratore’s black-and-white cinematography. The 91 minute doc was captured digitally so that classic, faintly grainy celluloid atmosphere is missing, but God, the silvery bath quality is magnificent.

HE to GDT (sent this morning):  “Your thoughts about Hitchcock and Psycho deliver the usual insight and erudition, but that aside you look really great in this thing. The crisp, silvery black & white cinematography and the exquisite, just-so key lighting and the way it makes your eyes and hair glisten are major stand-outs. 

“By the way, 78/52 was shot on some kind of ‘50s-era Bates Motel set, but where? At some out-of-the-way, non-pro location or one of the sound stages?”

The 78/52 interviewees include Bret Easton Ellis, Neil Marshall, Elijah Wood, Danny Elfman, Karyn Kusama, Apocalypse Now editor Walter Murch, Jamie Lee Curtis and Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony).

Last night Tatyana and I attended an A24 Lady Bird after-party at the London West Hollywood. In-and-out chats with director-writer Greta Gerwig and the great Beanie Feldstein, who plays the best friend of Saoirse Ronan‘s titular main character. Ronan and Lucas Hedges were also there. Thanks to Lisa Taback and Team A24 for the invite and good company. Variety reports, by the way, that Lady Bird has launched with $375K on four screens (2 in NYC, 2 in LA) for a $93,903 per screen average — “the best limited opening of the year.” A24 will expand into more markets next weekend in preparation for a nationwide break over Thanksgiving weekend. Once again, my Telluride rave.

Sidenote: Early on director Rod Lurie tossed me a friendly, good-natured insult — “How is it, Jeff, that you’re married to such a beautiful woman?” I replied nonchalantly that birds of a feather tend to flock together, etc. But whaddaya whaddaya?

Lady Bird director-writer Greta Gerwig.

Lady Bird crew at last nights’ gathering (l. to r.): Bespectacled mystery dude, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges, mystery gal, Saoirse Ronan, Odeya Rush.

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“One day during the making of Reds editor Dede Allen (who had edited Beatty previously in Bonnie and Clyde) congratulated the auteur on the script (which was co-written by Trevor Griffiths, in his master’s voice). “The dialogue, the cadences, sounds very contemporary, very modern,” Allen said. Beatty drily replied, “Dede, this is not Warren Beatty as John Reed — this is John Reed as Warren Beatty. That’s what being a movie star is.” — from a Cinephilia & Beyond piece by Tim Pelan called “Warren Beatty’s Reds: ‘A Long, Long Movie About a Communist Who Died.’”

Who knows if there will even be serious film historians 50 years hence? The culture might be so degraded by then…I don’t want to think about it. But if they’re still around one or two will probably look back upon our troubled epoch and ask “which 2017 films really conveyed what the world was like back then? Which tried to express what people were hoping for or afraid of? Which tell us the most in terms of cultural self-portraiture or self-reflection?”

I can guarantee you right now that Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! will definitely be among the few films that scholars of 2067 will study when they ponder U.S. culture during the first year of Donald Trump’s administration.

I can also assure you that no one will pay the slightest historical attention to Thor: Ragnarok or Logan or even Blade Runner 2049. These three films have earned serious box-office coin, of course, while mother! topped out at a measly $17,800,004 domestic and $25,850,098 foreign. But they won’t matter when all has been said and done and the deciders have completed their assessments. Art lasts; all diversions melt.

In the same way that the mid ‘1950s were clearly reflected by Kiss Me Deadly, Patterns, No Down Payment and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the currents of the mid to late’60s were mirrored by Bonnie and Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, The President’s Analyst and The Graduate, Aronofsky’s allegorical horror film burrows right into the dirt and muck of the here-and-now.

In my book mother! is either the fourth- or fifth-best film of the year, in part because it’s probably the most courageous. How did Aronofsky get Paramount to finance and release a film that Joe and Jane Popcorn reportedly hated with a passion? Whatever the back-story, the release of mother! is a proud event in the annals of American cinema because it went for something and nailed it, because it reaches right into the nightmares and agitations and self-loathings of a convulsive era and says “do you smell it…do you sense the disease and disruption? Not the chaos that you’re watching on-screen, but the real-deal horrors that are defining the world outside?”

If there are any film critics organizations out there with any balls, they’ll give Aronofsky a special artistic courage award or two next month.

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Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver deserves a salute for creating something that felt semi-original — a violent, fast-driving action musical of sorts. The presumed goal behind Wright’s recent campaign appearances has been to land a Best Original Screenplay nomination. In a fair and thoughtful world, that notion would still be in play. And maybe it still is. But I have a feeling that Kevin Spacey‘s radioactive dust might get in the way. Distractions should never matter, but this one might. I also suspect that if Wright hadn’t decided to inject Baby Driver with insanity serum during the last 15 or 20 minutes he would be in a stronger position now.