I’ve been hating on Asian action aesthetics (i.e., John Woo blam-blammers, sword ballet flicks, martial arts anything) for roughly two decades, but over the last few years my disdain has been focused on the moronic taste buds and grotesque influence of the Chinese movie market. Particularly when combined with the popularity of videogame flicks. You could argue that adapting video games into features is a double-down strategy as fantasy tentpoles have been aping the videogame aesthetic for a good decade or so. Either way they seem a safe bet when you factor in the overseas market.

The Angry Birds Movie (5.20.16) earned a modest $105,936,416 domestic but a $337,542,301 total worldwide. The recently popped Warcraft (6.10.16) earned a modest $46,510,135 here but $383,500,000 overseas for an eye-popping worldwide total of $430,010,135. I refused to sit through it, of course, but the combined Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes tallies underline where Chinese moviegoers are at on the evolutionary scale. Remember the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001?

The next videogame biggie is Justin Kurzel‘s Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21) with HE non-favorite Michael Fassbender (the chilly stare, the surly frown) playing the lead/cashing the check. Death to Assassin’s Creed, death to the creative visions of Kurzel/Fassbender (they made the gray, grime-gunky Macbeth together), death to the Chinese. I don’t really mean “death” — I just mean “thanks, guys, for cranking out and supporting this spreading mushroom-cloud influence upon cinema and world culture.” I’m sure all the participants will profit handily, and that swaggering Fassbender (who also produced) will be lighting his cigars with $100 bills when his participation checks begin to roll in.

Pokemon GO is just insane right now. This is in Central Park. It's basically been HQ for Pokemon GO. pic.twitter.com/3v2VfEHzNA

— Jonathan Perez (@IGIhosT) July 11, 2016

This morning I was typing out my Ghostbusters review on the outside front porch at WeHo’s Le Pain Quotidien, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that several heavy-footed people were walking to and fro. I’m talking about fairly heavy impact sounds (“thump! boom! thump! boom!”) and especially the vibrations — those poor wooden beams shuddering from all that heavy-heel action.

I noticed this morning even 95-pound pixie women were walking this way….boom! boom! Like little grenades going off. The fact is that relatively few people walk in a light-footed way, as I try to do. I at least try to not pound my heels into the floor. I try to walk like Vaslav Nijinsky or Rudolf Nureyev.

I remember pointing this out to my younger sister when I was 11 or 12. I told her she sounded like a sumo wrestler coming down the stairs, and I demonstrated how you can glide down the stairs like Jimmy Cagney or Fred Astaire.

I realize, of course, that over half of those reading this don’t have clue #1 who Nurevev, Nijinksy, Cagney or Astaire were.

Anomalisa director-writer Charlie Kaufman to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Nick Holdsworth: ““It has gotten considerably harder for me to get things made. The early movies I made in collaboration with established directors, but since 2008 [i.e., Synecdoche, New York] I have been working to direct my own movies. At this point in the film business I am taking assignments when I get them. I need to earn a salary. I am doing what I can to make a living, but hoping to do what I would like to do.”

Kaufman to Variety‘s Will Tizard: “I think I have to have one commercial success in the indie world and I’m off. Anything that I do in this form that makes its money back or a little bit more than break even. That’s all it is. I don’t think anybody cares about anything else when they’re financing movies.”

HE to Kaufman: The titles, dude. You’ll lose 90% of your potential audience if the titles of your films seem overly referenced or smarty-pants. You don’t have to “dumb” your titles down, but they shouldn’t be aimed over the heads of people who graduated high school but skipped college.

The new Kino Bluray of William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident (’43) pops on Tuesday, 7.12. DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze is saying it’s superior to the German (i.e., Koch Media) Bluray that I bought two or three years ago. I’ve never liked the German Bluray — too light, too speckly, too grainy. Do I trade it in for Amoeba store credit and buy the Kino version? Of course I do.

From “Another Hurtin’ Sundance Cancer Drama,” filed on 1.22.16: “Chris Kelly‘s Other People (Vertical, 9.9.16) struck me as deftly written and persuasively well-acted but fraught with self-pity and a little too glum. Wading through and meditating upon cancer death will have that affect. But it’s delicate and restrained and absorbing as far as it goes. And occasionally amusing. But…I don’t know what else to say. I felt respect more than affection.

“Some in the Eccles audience were reportedly choking up; not this horse. After the show I spoke to two or three guys (i.e., writers) who were partly critical; one was outright dismissive. I later saw on Twitter that others (but not all) were putting it down.

“Relatively few will pay to see this in theatres but it’s really not half bad, especially in terms of the acting. I never pulled back or disconnected; I always felt engaged. There’s already a consensus that Molly Shannon, who plays a spirited suburban mom dying of leiomyosarcoma, will be Best Actress-nominated for a Spirit or a Gotham Award. And that the low-key, somewhat pudgy, ginger-haired Jesse Plemons scores also as her son, a gay showbiz writer grappling with more than just the immediate tragedy at hand.

I didn’t mind Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters at first. I actually didn’t mind it for the first 80 of its 116 minutes. Then Feig throws the corporate formula switch and Ghostbusters eats itself for the last 35. It does a major swan dive into the swamp of CG overkill, and the experience numbs your soul.

Jones, McCarthy, Wiig and HE’s own Kate McKinnon.

Going in I knew Ghostbusters would be a spirited, corporatized, digitally upgraded rehash of the ’84 original. Melissa McCarthy as Dan Aykroyd, Kristen Wiig as Bill Murray, Kate McKinnon as Harold Ramis, Leslie Jones as Ernie Hudson. And it is that. A “same but newer and splashier” approach — similar set-up, similar absurd story, same determination to de-fang and de-mystify the notion of actual ghosts by turning them into Disneyworld creations.

For what it’s worth, McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon and Jones hold their own and keep the ball in the air. I liked their company. McKinnon is the most internalized of the four, but I’d love to see her as a lead in something. (A smart lesbo or hetero romcom? I’m good either way.) Jones is a lot of fun. McCarthy and Wiig deliver their usual usual. And hunky Chris Hemsworth, as their mentally-challenged assistant, is inoffensively okay.

Variety‘s Peter Debruge has complained that Feig is too averse to potential new realms, saying that “the fault lies in the fact that this new Ghostbusters doesn’t want us to forget them, crafting its new team in the earlier team’s shadow.”

Well…of course! Movies like this are never about throwing away the roadmap and revelling in creative invention — they’re about cashing in by delivering mostly the same thing only re-stirred and re-fried with some fresh cream on top.

Roland Joffe‘s The Killing Fields (’84) is, of course, a respected, harrowing, award-winning drama about the real-life horrors experienced by N.Y. Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian photographer and interpreter Dith Pran. To me here were always four stars of that film — Sam Waterston (who played Schanberg), Schanberg, Dith and the Cambodian actor who played him, Haing S. Ngor, and won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts. With today’s announcement of Schanberg’s death at age 82, only one of the original four is still with us — Waterston. Ngor, whom I interviewed for Us magazine in the fall of ’84, was killed by Los Angeles gang-bangers during a robbery assault in 1996. And Dith died of pancreatic cancer in ’08.

There’s a piece in the August issue of Town and Country, written by Daniel Mendelsohn (who is not, as far as I know, related to HE’s constantly sweating, cigarette-smoking Ben Mendelsohn) and dated 6.29.16.

Definitely not aimed at under-40 readers, the piece is called “Is This the End of Civility As We Know It?” and is basically about how social media has created a more self absorbed and narcissistic population. The message is moot but stated nonetheless: when you’re out and about, it’s uncivil to engage in a more profound relationship with one’s cell phone than with the person or universe in front of you. And more than that, it makes you an idiot.

Related quote: “The Greeks had a special horror of people who imported their private concerns into the public arena — the agora, where civic life unfolded.

“In fact, they had a word for that kind of person. Idiotes is derived from the adjective idios, which means private. Originally its meaning was innocuous: a private person. But precisely because life in a city like Athens or New York takes place in shared spaces as well as in private ones, the word came to mean someone who was irritatingly, stubbornly, contrarily ‘private’ even when he shouldn’t be.

“Over many centuries the last syllable of the word was eroded away by a million lips in 10,000 cities, from Athens to Constantinople to Antioch to Rome, leaving us with what is, when you think about it, as good a term as any to describe a figure who clomps obliviously down a city street while seemingly talking to himself, or sucker-punches someone for having different views, or practices any number of other behaviors that we would once have laughed at but now have become appallingly common: idiot.”

As I understood the betting three days ago, Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment suit again Fox News chairman Roger Ailes would probably result in Ailes’ departure from Fox, especially with senior Fox execs James and Lachlan Murdoch reportedly feeling little allegiance to the 76 year-old chairman.

Now, with six more women having told tales about Ailes (two on the record, four anonymous) in a just-popped New York piece by Gabriel Sherman, it would appear that he’s completely finished — no ifs, ands or buts.

Sherman’s story actually states that “more than a dozen women have contacted Carlson’s New Jersey-based attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, and made detailed allegations of sexual harassment by Ailes over a 25-year period dating back to the 1960s when he was a producer on The Mike Douglas Show.” Sherman’s story doesn’t suggest that Ailes is “the new Bill Cosby,” as someone called him a day or two ago, but his alleged behavior is close enough.

Every dog has his day. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

The primary conveyance in Tope Ongundare‘s “The Vitality of Monica Vitti,” a Fandor video that popped on 6.7, is that her existential angst channellings in those four Michelangelo Antonioni movies (L’Avventura, La Notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert) wouldn’t have penetrated if she hadn’t also conveyed gioia della vita — intensity, aliveness, a readiness to dance at the drop of a hat. Which is true. I’ve been a Vitti fan for ages so don’t tell me.

You know who also doesn’t need a reminder? Greta Gerwig. On 7.13.13 I tapped out the following after catching a screening of L’Avventura at the Film Forum:

“Gerwig was there, sitting all alone in the 10th or 11th row. We talked a bit after the show. She’s thoroughly spellbound by Vitti‘s performance, she said. Like me, she’s seen L’Avventura six or seven times. This is what women of extraordinary character and cinematic devotion do — they slip into revival screenings of classic films on a Friday night without a boyfriend and certainly without an entourage.”

I’m still not sure if Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (TriStar, 11.16) has been entirely or partially shot in 6K at 120 frames-per-second. Let’s assume “entirely” until someone in authority states otherwise. I for one am tingling with anticipation at watching an Iraq War Catch-22-like satire at 120 fps all in. Even if the process is just being used for the battle scenes, I’m there with bells on.

Collider‘s Steve Weintraub recently spoke with Billy Lynn (and Equals) costar Kristen Stewart about Lee’s process. Her answer suggested that Billy Lynn‘s HFR will be a different deal than the 48 fps projection that Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit (Warner Bros., 12.14) was projected at in some venues, and which was met with scorn.

“The way Ang described it is he feels so disconnected from movies that he watches that he just wants to feel like he’s closer, and that he’s done this with Billy Lynn. He’s somehow achieved that, so I can’t wait to see it,” Stewart said. “Usually if you do that without whatever process he’s doing — [and] I have no idea [what that is]– it makes it look like reality TV, it makes it crisp in a way that actually detaches you. [But] he messes with depth of field. Usually the way a lens works, you control where the focal point is, [but] in this case everything’s in focus. So when you watch the movie you can decide, almost as if you’re there in person, what you want to look at, which has just never been seen before on film.”

Every person on the planet with functioning eyes, even those wearing high-magnification lenses, is processing life at 120 fps. That’s how our eyes make reality look. But replicate a semblance of this in a feature film, as Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit, and people freak out. They want the familiar bath of 24 fps. I loved the Hobbit‘s 48 fps process, if only because it relieved me of having to pay attention to the plot and the performance.