More or less verbatim from Richard Rushfield’s Ankler piece titled “is Paramount Cursed?”: “[There have been] plenty of Paramount films that, on paper, should’ve been okay. But somehow, something just didn’t go right. Every. Single. Time.

“Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard in a glamorous WW2 spy thriller! Sounds great! Reboot The Ring! Monster Trucks that are actually monsters! The kids will love it! A new Ben Hur for the Game of Thrones generation! Scarlett Johansson in a white body suit doing anime! A Martin Scorsese medieval thriller! A new Star Trek!  A new Zoolander! A new Jack Reacher! A bawdy Office Christmas Party with every buzzy comedy star on earth! A medium-budget Michael Bay contemporary war thriller! A Meryl Streep Oscar bait film! A Richard Linklater 80’s comedy! A Tina Fey war comedy! And best of all, Dwayne Johnson in an R-rated comic reboot of a universally known TV series!

“What a line-up! How could most of those not catch fire? Or at least…some? One or two? Okay, the last XXX did well in China. [But] when that much goes wrong in that many ways, it’s time to consider that supernatural powers may be at work and perhaps what you need isn’t a new studio chief as much as an exorcist.

Wells interjection: Brad Grey‘s sad, very recent passing requires Rushfield to avoid stating the obvious, which is that the above-described films were all Grey’s.

“I hear from the Paramount lot that a lot of nerves are getting jangly as they wait for the Gianopulos reign to kick in. Lots of high hopes, but still looking for that brilliant, curse-breaking plan to come down.”

“The trades are dissecting — with Paramount’s help — what went wrong with Baywatch,” Rushfield states. “Lots of finger pointing at Rotten Tomatoes and their blasted 19% score. “A recent internal study at Paramount concluded that younger ticket buyers pay close attention to aggregated scores on Rotten Tomatoes,” reports THR.

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Tatyana and I are staying in a stone cottage on a wine farm called Azienda Agricola Caparsa (47 Via Caparsa), near Radda in Chianti. The owner, Paolo Cianferoni, is a dead ringer for Steven Spielberg if you take away the beard, and if you de-age Spielberg by ten years. Paolo told me yesterday that original Sideways author Rex Pickett stayed here some years back. So between Pickett, Spielberg and myself the place has a definite Hollywood aroma.

Paolo’s electric bolt fence is more or less dead center in this photo. You can’t see it all that clearly, I realize, but does that matter? It’s there, okay? I’m telling you.

I told Paolo that Tatyana and I were planning to hike over to Radda in Chianti, and so he pointed to a shortcut path through his vineyard. He then pointed to a metal gate at the top of a far-off incline. The gate was electrified, he said, to keep out deer and whatnot, but that I just needed to open it carefully and watch where I step.

So we got to the gate and I delicately opened it — no shock. Thinking I was in the clear, I stepped through and, being a bit sweaty and breath-starved, missed the fact that a thick, coiled, half-camoflauged wire was lying in the dirt three or four inches from the gate. My ankles touched it and suddenly I was James Cagney at the end of Angels With Dirty Faces. My body convulsed. I felt as if my kidneys had been punched by a guy with brass knuckles. The electric current was mild (i.e., high enough to dissuade animals without killing them), but it definitely rocked my attitude.

For a while there I felt like (a) a huge dumbass.  I actually still feel this way.

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In a 5.27 Indiewire piece from Cannes, Eric Kohn passes along a chat with Mad Max maestro George Miller, president of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival jury. Kohn wanted to know about the criteria that Miller brought to jury deliberations. “One of the good things to do is to ask everyone what they think makes a good film,” he said. “It varies with everybody. For me, the way I define a good film is how long it follows you out of the cinema. By the time you get to the parking lot, if it stays with you, then you know it’s good. How long does a film follow you around?”

HE answer to question #1: A good film is not one that massages some arcane aesthetic fancy or rehashes a Joseph Campbell myth or throws the lettuce leaves in the air without strategy or which reaches down into your private little p.c. cave and says ‘hey, homey…I’ve found you and we get each other…you’re my hombre and vice versa.” A good film conveys some kind of profound, universally recognized truth or truths that are recognized not just by you or your friends but by the stupidest assholes on the planet. It does this by slipping into private places, reshuffling old cards, resuscitating old feelings or generally bringing it all back home…it sinks into your system and reminds you that this, in part, is the way things really are. A good film might provoke or disturb on some deep-down level, but you know it’s dead real.

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Fairly expert for this kind of thing. I’ve been on trains, felt these things or at least dreamt them. Directed by Seb Edwards, music by Max Richter, etc.

Scores of 97% and 79% are pretty high for a superhero flick, especially a D.C. Comics property from Warner Bros. I haven’t been able to see Patti Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., 6.2) due to the usual May travelling. It opens worldwide on Thursday, 6.1. I could catch it in Rome.

All kinds of racist scum have crawled out of the woodwork since Donald Trump‘s election last November. Uglies nationwide have felt the freedom to vent and brutalize, knowing that a certain form of code-worded kinship has been emanating from the Oval Office. It seems obvious that last Friday’s racist murders aboard a Portland train three days ago were another manifestation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations “blamed an increase in anti-Muslim incidents in part on Trump’s focus on militant Islamist groups and anti-immigrant rhetoric,” says a 5.29 Reuters story. In short, Trump supplied the impetus that led to those guys being stabbed and two of them dying. Jeremy Joseph Christian merely wielded the weapon.

'They lost their lives because of me.' Teen thanks men who intervened to try and stop hate speech on Portland train https://t.co/lYhFDJlrlo pic.twitter.com/jCLZ3NtHLN

— CNN (@CNN) May 29, 2017

Grinnell College alumnus Kumail Nanjiani ’01 delivered the Grinnell College 2017 commencement address on 5.22.17. “Grinnell, not Cornell,” “fuck an immigrant,” etc. The video posted that day. Hollywood Elsewhere, way over in Italy, is paying attention just over a week later.

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Every now and then I’ll share a valid perception about the movie realm. Sometimes ahead of the curve; now and then behind. But whenever I sense that an actor’s bullshit is no longer working and destined for rejection, it always seems to take ticket-buyers as long as two or three years to come to the same realization, and sometimes even longer. They need time to think it over, but now they’ve finally come to a decision about Dwayne Johnson. Baywatch, I mean, but the film is pretty much a referendum on Johnson’s marquee appeal.

“If Dwayne Johnson Is Starring, It’s Probably Empty, Glossy Dogshit” — posted on 12.8.16, reposting once again: “Dwayne Johnson is a comme ci comme ca Republican who’s out to make dough and keep things as vapid and formulaic as possible. An amiable baba with a ripped bod. During the Obama era Johnson became one of the biggest emblems of the constellation of multicultural superstardom; now there’s something about him that smells a little Trumpish. His shallow opportunist colors are showing all the more.”

Johnson’s inability or refusal last weekend to accept that Baywatch was tanking seemed particularly Trumpish to me.

I don’t know to put this exactly, but I’ve been a Cialis guy for several years now. Those little tan-colored pills fill me with compassion for all those 40-plus guys who had to make do on their own throughout history, going back to the Egyptians. Cialis is as vital to the rapture of things as cookies and cream gelato, a good film, a well-written sentence, a great joke, the wind assaultng my helmet as I’m running around on the Kawasaki, fresh-squeezed orange juice, chugging Perrier water after exercising, oxygen, jangly guitar chords, garlic mashed potatoes, the feeling of endorphins, etc. Even without the slightest expectation of romantic attention, I love the way it makes me feel like a coyote, like I’m 29 and running to catch a fly ball in center field. But last year I upped the dosage to 60 mg, and began to feel occasional Cialis heartburn. The sensation almost felt like a heart attack (or the way I imagined one would feel), but they went away after a minute or so. So I stopped with the 60mg and rolled things back to 20mg, and that was better. I don’t know why I just wrote this.