For the last few weeks Woody Allen has been sussing casting picks for his 2018 film, which is some kind of late=teen or early-20something relationship film. I’ve known the name of the male lead for a while now, but the drag-ass agents don’t want anything announced until solid offers have gone out, etc. Suffice that every hot-shit actress around 19 or 20 has been eyeballed or seriously discussed or whatever. Not so long ago one of these candidates, I’ve been told, was Hailee Steinfeld. But at roughly the same time (i.e., mid to late May?) Steinfeld was offered Paramount and Travis Knight‘s Bumblebee movie, a Transformers spin-off thing. I’m not sure what the strategy was or wasn’t on the Woody side, but word around the campfire is that Steinfeld’s agent told her she couldn’t afford to do a Woody, that after the lousy $18 million earned worldwide by Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Edge of Seventeen (which I mostly hated) she needed to to go for the green, and so she said yes to the fucking Bumblebee.

Don’t look now, but Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk opens in less than three weeks. Given my very special relationship with Warner Bros. publicity, I’ll probably be among the last to see it. That’s okay — I’ll just process the fawning reactions of the Nolan geeks, and then come in at the last minute like Mr. Truth Squad (i.e., “the kiss-assery stops here”).

Meanwhile Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich has ranked Nolan’s previous nine films, worst to best.

The worst is The Dark Knight Rises, Ehrlich says, and the best is The Prestige. What?

Not only do I not agree about Nolan’s 2006 magician film, I can’t even remember much about it. I remember I felt a wee bit trapped as I watched it. I recall the dandy duds and grim expressions of Hugh Jackman (i.e., The Great Danton) and the obsessive pisshead manner of Christian Bale (Alfred Borden) and the downish, lemme-outta-here vibes and Wally Pfister‘s gaslamp cinematography. For some reason my most vivid recollection is David Bowie‘s cameo-sized performance as Nikola Tesla, although I recall thinking “Jesus, Bowie really doesn’t look like The Thin White Duke anymore.”

I’d not ranking The Prestige at the bottom of Nolan’s films. I’m not even ranking it because it never rustled my curtains. I’m not saying I don’t respect it. I’m saying I didn’t give that much of a shit when it opened ten and a half years ago, no offense, and I care even less now.

Ehrlich’s bottom to top: 9. The Dark Knight Returns, 8. Following, 7. Insomnia, 6. Batman Begins, 5. The Dark Knight, 4. Interstellar (great merciful bloodstained Gods, Ehrlich!), 3. Inception, 2. Memento, 1. The Prestige.

HE’s bottom to top: 9. The Prestige (not last but floating, inconclusive, a phantom flick), 8. Interstellar (bored and infuriated by the story, double-hated Nolan’s sound design), 7. Inception (cool concept, too long, nice FX, too underlined and drawn out at the end, couldn’t understand Ken Watanebe to save my life), 6. The Dark Knight Rises, 5. Following (which I didn’t see until 2015), 4. Insomnia, 3. Batman Begins, 2. The Dark Knight, 1. Memento.

President Trump actually tweeted this CG-created wrestling clip this morning. On one level a primitive macho fantasy about schooling CNN but also an encouragement to loyalists to rough up journalists. What. An. Asshole.

Read more

From a Boston reader this morning: “I’ve been seeing advertising for Andy Serkis and Andrew Garfield‘s Breathe (Bleecker Street/Participant, 10.13) and am wondering how it might perform, both commercially and critically, in the wake of David Gordon Green and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Stronger (Lionsgate/Roadside, 9.22), which will open three weeks earlier. Both are about men, driven by a woman’s love, overcoming great physical challenges and odds against a long, full life. Three factors: (a) close release-date proximity, (b) the commonality of plot, and (c) the Andrew vs. Jake thing. Whaddaya think?”

My response: “Spiritual uplift dramas about average folks slammed by tragedy and misfortune but refusing to accept a grim fate or a curtailed lifespan have, of course, constituted a dramatic genre for the last three decades. Life threw a curve or buried them in suffering but they wouldn’t buckle. Spirit, perseverance, grit. The support of families, wives, co-workers, etc.

Breathe and Stronger are kin of all kinds of films in this realm. Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions, in which the life of polio victim John Hawkes was spiritually opened up by Helen Hunt‘s sex surrogate, is similar to Breathe as they both deal with guys paralyzed from the neck down. The total paralysis enveloping Mathieu Amalric in Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (’07) is even more extreme.

Stronger is about real-life Boston bombing victim Jeff Bauman (Gyllenhaal) overcoming the loss of his legs, obviously a less daunting challenge than the one facing Garfield but still a tough haul.

Expand the pain parameters and you could include The King’s Speech (royal stuttering), all kinds of concentration camp dramas (Angelina Jolie‘s relatively recent Unbroken, Robert Young‘s Triumph of the Spirit, Joseph Sargent and Arthur Miller‘s Playing For Time), Jim Sheridan and Daniel Day Lewis‘s My Left Foot (a seminal physical-malady film, released in ’89), innumerable disease-of-the-week TV dramas from the ’80s, etc.

Read more

Thanks to Alejandro G. Inarritu and Katie Calhoon for allowing Tatyana and I to attend the LACMA installation of Carne y Arena at the last minute. We went late yesterday morning; it opens today. Intense, jolting, emotional, essential. The whole run (ending sometime in September) is sold out. Here, again, is my piece about visiting the Cannes film Festival installation (posted on 5.18.17). And here’s a nicely descriptive 6.29 L.A. Times piece by Carolina Miranda. I was studying the particulars a bit more this time; I could do this another few times easy. But I’ll never park inside the L.A. County Museum garage ever again. $16 for 66 minutes, kiss my ass. Which is another reason why I’m mostly a two-wheel man. I never pay anything for parking the bike (I just weave around the gates), and no one ever gives me a ticket.

Urban Dictionary says the primary definition of “kicks” is shoes, but what they really mean is spiffy shoes. I haven’t heard anyone say the word “kicks” in this context since the Ford administration, if that. Some words die from attrition; the culture loses interest and they fall off the vine. Has anyone used or heard “kicks” anytime this century, or even during Reagan-Bush-Clinton? There’s one shoe term that I know is dead and gone for the most part, and that’s “sporty.” The only people who say “sporty” are 70something guys who play golf or conservatives who own yachts or older Wall Street dicks. In Out Of The Past Robert Mitchum bought a pair like this when he was in Acapulco looking for Jane Greer, and then suddenly Kirk Douglas showed up, looked down at the new shoes, grinned and called them “sporty.” That was 70 years ago. “Sporty” is finished.

Dan Savage to Bill Maher around 5:05: “There’s no such thing as a blue state — there are red states with big blue cities in them. What Democrats have to do is unapologetically be the party of urban America the way Republicans are unapologetically the party of depopulated America, the party of rural America, exurbs and suburbs. If more people had turned out in the cities, Donald Trump would have never won the election. Democrats need to stop chasing voters they’re never going to get. Sending John Kerry out to shoot something with a gun right before the election didn’t win him any votes in knuckle-dragged America.”

I tried to hang this IKEA kitchen storage thing in the proper way. I measured everything six ways from Sunday, and then oh-so-carefully drilled the two holes, inserted the anchors, re-measured and eyeballed the damn thing and whirred the screws into the wall. Tweaking, adjusting. It’s very hard to do this right if you’re all alone. Did I use a level? No, but I kept eyeballing it over and over…this angle, that angle, standing back, tilting my head. Don’t go by this photo — it’s very close to being perfectly level. Alas, my eye is telling me “nope, it’s off by a just a scosche.” Fuck it — I raised the right side with a couple of finishing nails. Now it’s fine.

If only the Americans who are too dumb or deranged to see what’s happening to this nation under Donald Trump (backwater dumbshits, arch-conservative banshees like NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, etc.)…if only these lunatics would listen to Neil Young‘s “Children of Destiny“, their minds would start to change and the general tide of rightwing insanity would start to recede, thus paving the way for a Congressional turnaround in ’18, which would presumably be followed by Trump’s impeachment. Incidentally: Whatever happened to Young’s Pono player?

You don’t have to be an incorrigibly dull, low-wattage flatline type to wake up this weekend and say “let’s go see Despicable Me 3!” But it would help. For those with a passing interest in what’s really happening at the movies over the Independence Day holiday, the only thing to talk about is Baby Driver. 

Jett caught an Arclight showing yesterday afternoon (he tried for The Big Sick but it was sold out) and loved it. “You liked the ending, the last 15 or so?” I asked, somewhat incredulous. Yeah, he said. “But you’re a huge Drive fan!” I countered. “That was a different thing,” Jett replied. “This is a kind of satire of Drive with a La La Land attitude.”

What’s the verdict from the HE first-wavers who caught it last night or the night before? Deadline is projecting a five-day Baby box-office of $27 or $28 million.