Filed by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson on 9.16.16: “Holly Hunter stars as an administrator at a southern university who, still mourning her son seven years after his death, sets off on something of a fact-finding mission to discover what exactly happened to him the night that he died, and how his grad-school business plan for a hot-dog restaurant (yup) ended up in the hands of a school friend, who’s now a successful hot-dog entrepreneur.

“Strange Weather is overwritten, with characters speaking in a stilted, presentational style oddly reminiscent of early Dawson’s Creek. But when it’s good, the script has an admirable frankness — it’s refreshingly not coy about its emotions and intents.

“Hunter is earthy and immediate as a mother whose grief has hardened into a paralyzing, everyday anger — often masked by good cheer and a cigarette, but suddenly erupting out of her with the arrival of new information. Hunter’s road-trip pal is the terrific Carrie Coon, and the two have a lively rapport, particularly in one long, bruising scene in which some old secrets are laid bare. Strange Weather maintains its mellow, southern-slowed vibe even through the most emotional stuff, but by the end the film has crept up and delivered a sudden, unexpected punch.”

All day yesterday I was looking at this video of a happy, groovin’ gorilla — twirling around in a small pool, spirits flying, ecstatic splasharoonie. But on Twitter I kept reading what a terrible thing this was, how the poor beast had been humiliated, that his dignity had been robbed by 21st Century asshats whose default attitude is to regard him as some kind of clown. The people lamenting this were sensitive animal-lover types, whom I’ve always felt a strong kinship with. But c’mon, man…this guy is obviously having a good time. Either animal-rights guys are SJWs who don’t know joy when they see it, or they do recognize it and feel an instinctual revulsion.

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A rambling report about the firing of Han Solo spinoff helmers Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, posted yesterday (6.22) on Starwarsnewsnet.com, basically says that concerns about Lord and Miller’s “screwball comedy” approach were first voiced by none other than Han Solo himself — i.e., the beady-eyed, relentlessly sullen Alden Ehrenreich. Rather than summarize this epic-lengthed saga, I’ll just post excerpts with the snow boiled out:

Excerpt #1: “Several weeks into production, there were concerns that in spite of the good work that Lord & Miller were doing with their movie, something was decidedly off about the way that their signature approach was taking the project, and that the bickering between them and the powers that be (i.e., Kathy Kennedy, Lawrence Kasdan) continued off and on. But the first person who [expressed concern] about these worries wasn’t Kasdan or Kennedy. It was fucking Ehrenreich.” [HE explanation: The last four words were written entirely by me — I just liked the way they sounded.]

Alden Ehrenreich, allegedly the guy who first voiced concerns about Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s screwball approach to the Han Solo spinoff flick.

Excerpt #2: “Ehrenreich…started to worry that Lord & Miller’s screwball comedy angle was starting to interfere with what the character of Han Solo is really about, [given that Lord and Miller’s Solo] was a younger, more reckless take on the character than the one we met in that Cantina on Tatooine. One source described it as being oddly comparable to Jim Carrey’s performance in Ace Ventura at times. Ehrenreich let his concerns be known to one of the producers, who then told Kennedy about it, which led to her decision to look over the existing footage.”

Excerpt #3: “People close to the project have positively described…several isolated scenes [directed by Lord and Miller]. However, once an assembly cut actually started to come together, Kennedy and Kasdan — as well as the other people reporting to them — started to get deeply concerned. There was something of a ‘zany’ tone to more scenes than they would have liked — in part due to some of the improv — and I get the feeling that fans might take more of an issue with this than they would have if the film had been left unfixed.

Excerpt #4: “At some point in production, some kind of hiatus took place, and this is where they reviewed the footage and told Lord & Miller that they’d need to overhaul the movie with reshoots when they worked on it later. Lord & Miller…were pretty rebellious [about this], their response being an ultimatum — i.e., either let us handle the reshoots our way or we’re out. And [so] they were shown the door.”

Ron Howard will reportedly begin directing the remainder of the Han Solo spinoff flick on July 10th in the wake of Kathy Kennedy‘s firing of original directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, who had overseen roughly two-thirds (more?) of the planned photography.

How will the final directing credits be worked out? “Directed by Ron Howard, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller“? “Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller with some last-minute finessing by Ron Howard“? “Directed by Ron Howard — Initial, Tonally Unsatisfying Footage Captured by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller“?

It seems to me that Howard should just come in like a pro, finish the job and forget about any credit. It would be beneath him to say “those other guys didn’t get along with Kathy so I want credit for bringing this film home.” Howard is a highly respected, first-rate director who doesn’t need to grab any credit when in fact he’s been brought in as a high-class janitor — a clean-up guy. 

Remember Dustin Hoffman taking Robert Redford‘s copy and “polishing” it in All The President’s Men? Roughly the same deal here. 

Perhaps some reshoots will happen, but the fact remains that most of the shooting has already happened, and the scenes that have been shot can only be edited or finessed in certain ways. Right?

Woody Allen on Donald Trump, quoted by Screen Daily: “I still don’t know why he wanted the job. I never felt it was up his alley. It never occurred to me that he would win the presidency or that he was even interested in politics. There was never any hint of that.” Wells to Allen: He wanted the job in order to commercially re-vitalize or reinvigorate the Trump brand, which had never fully recovered from the stigma of four bankruptcies.

I’ve always loved this photo of WNBC newsman Gabe Pressman listening to the Beatles during their first-ever U.S. press conference, minutes after they landed at JFK airport on 2.7.64. Here, in a nutshell, is the great hair gulf between generations — the 39 year-old Pressman, a WWII veteran and very much a Brylcream man, pondering a new wave of longish, non-Brylcreamed hair as the world turns and a new chapter begins. Anyone who grew up in the tri-state area in the ’60s and ’70s remembers Pressman — hard-nut TV street reporter, always with the mike, more than 60 years on the beat. He began in the mid ’50s and never retired. Wiki excerpt: “Until the very end, Pressman worked part-time at WNBC, mostly as a blog writer about New York City news on the station’s website. He was [also] active on Twitter. In 2014, he stated that an arthritic knee kept him from chasing stories like he used to. A few months before his death, Pressman covered the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York.”

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I just got an auto-response email that says “I am currently out of the office with no access to emails.” I get the message — “please converse with my associates while I re-charge” — but if it were me, I would say the following: “Of course, naturally, I’m receiving your emails. I’m not dead or in a coma or hibernating in a deep, dark cave or stranded on a Himalayan mountain peak or camel-ing across the Jordanian desert. I’m hearing you, reading you. I’m just doing that soul-nourishing, plant-watering thing that we all need to do from time to time. No biggie. Talk to you soon.”

Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

From my 1.25.17 review — “Odd, Minimalist, Engagingly Trippy Ghost Story“:

“David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story (A24) lives on the opposite side of the canyon from Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart‘s Personal Shopper, a ghost tale which is all kinds of different and original but seriously scary from time to time. It has to be said upfront that Lowery’s film isn’t all that scary. Okay, two or three moments put the chill in but this isn’t the game plan, and that’s what’s so cool about it. Really. Either you get that or you don’t.

“For this is basically a story about a broken-hearted male ghost (or formerly male) who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and so he mopes around and says to himself ‘Jesus, I feel kind of fucked…where am I?…what’s happening?…am I gonna stand around watching humans for decades or even centuries? I don’t know what the hell to do.’

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