The other day I was trying to figure a fresh way of addressing the same old megaplex malaise that the film industry has painted itself into a corner with. The domination, I mean, of superhero flicks, cheap horror, dumb comedies, family fantasies, romcoms and girl-power fables, etc. I’m boring myself by just repeating this. Not counting, of course, (a) the occasional middle-ground surprises, (b) the award-season films that are the oxygen of my life, (c) indie flicks and (d) the social realism and smart adult crime dramas that are pretty much owned by cable and streaming.

Then five days ago a numbers-and-trend analysis by TimStarz04 came along that analogizes Hollywood’s superhero-fantasy obsession with the 1% choke-hold that has increasingly controlled the U.S. economy over the last dozen or so years. The essay lasts 16 minutes (an eternity in the ADD realm) but is worth watching. No brilliant solutions and maybe a bit too much cynicism, but this is definitely the way things are right now.

Portion of 5.25 Weekly Standard summary by Jonathan V. Last: “The big movie studios are undergoing something like the same stresses the American middle-class has experienced over the last two decades: They’re seeing radical increases in the cost of living (for them actor salaries and marketing costs), increased competition from globalization and cheap labor (in the form of cable TV, internet streaming services, and amateur videomakers), yet they’re suffering from stagnant income (meaning that total movie revenues are more or less flat).

“The analogy goes a step further: Just as America has witnessed rising income inequality, the same phenomenon has hit Hollywood movies. Movie revenues aren’t growing much, but a smaller and smaller percentage of movies are claiming a larger and larger share of the total pie. Which movies are the 1 percent in this analogy? Comic book movies.

I thought I made this clear three months ago when the first Deepwater Horizon teaser popped but let’s try again. I really, really don’t like cutaways to anxious, worried wifeys (Kate Hudson in this instance) and scared little daughters while brave daddy (Mark Wahlberg) and his resourceful buddies are grappling with a major catastrophe. Same deal with The Perfect Storm — cut to the girlfriend/wife waiting in a bar for the latest news and the movie stops cold. Deepsix the family stuff while there’s still time. (If Terrence Malick can erase characters and subplots in the editing room, why not Peter Berg?) Just start with Wahlberg and his buddies showing up for work on that fateful day and then just tell the story. How and why the BP shitstorm happened, what they were facing, who got killed and why, and how they finally capped the oil spill.

A friend sent me this photo yesterday. It’s a groaner when someone else says this, but it’s a shame, really, that you can’t really feel the full exuberance while you’re young. I know…shut up! What I mean is not that it’s a shame that things are currently…well, a wee bit dismaying from a biological standpoint (actually not that bad), but that so much of my youth was beset by poverty, anxiety, rejection and fear of what the future might bring (or, more to the point, what it might not bring) that I couldn’t really enjoy it. I was pretty much a lad of constant fretting.

I did enjoy things to some extent (okay, sometimes to a great extent) but so much was weighing me down. I felt the music but the rent was constantly due, not to mention my inability to pay for the serious tune-up that my VW Fastback desperately needed, not to mention all those unpaid parking tickets. Then again I was batting a good .400 or so with the ladies, so there was that. Water under the bridge. But I don’t where I got that sweater or where the hell I got the idea that it would be cool to, you know, wear it.

Today’s cultural highlight was a visit to Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla museum (Krunska 51, Belgrade 11000). The other cultural immersion involved crossing the Saba river to visit high-rise workers apartments built in the Russian “brutalist” style of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. I’m sorry but they didn’t seem depressing enough to me — they were just dull. All hail the ghost of Nikola Tesla.

The ashes of Nikola Tesla, who died in 1943 at age 86, are kept within this small globe-shaped container inside the museum.

There’s nothing like lying on a bed and smelling…what is that? Something rank and musty. Sheets that might have been cleaned but were so cheap to begin with and have been slept on so often by so many dicey travellers (or by grandma and grandpa for decades) that they smell like a Goodwill store. The pillows smelled even worse. I finally used a pillow off the living room couch but that didn’t help much. And the bed was a fold-out so the mattress sagged and groaned and was maybe three inches thick. This is the first Airbnb I’ve ever been this unhappy with, bedding-wise. It’s not Airbnb’s fault — it’s the Belgrade thing. If you look beyond the rich culture and the storied architecture there are some economic and infrastructure issues. It’s been 17 years since the Kosovo War bombing but the city is still recovering in some respects. Am I unhappy here? No — I love it. But the bed is rank.

I’ve posted this photo because I’m flabbergasted by James Stewart‘s baby blues. But I was also thinking how this moment in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much isn’t all that different from that final bit in Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation when Bill Murray whispers something romantic into Scarlett Johansson‘s ear. What if in addition to the information about an assassination attempt and “Ambrose Chapel” Louis Bernard had added, “I also want you to know before I die that I love you, and that if I were to somehow survive this knife wound and if you should ever reconsider the wisdom of being married to Doris Day, that you would never want for a better lover or a more devoted companion than myself”? Hitchcock’s 1956 film would acquire a whole ‘nother level of intrigue.

Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, currently in Manhattan with her daughter Emma for a performance of Hamilton (which probably set her back $800 or even a grand for two tickets), had her wallet stolen on the R train. Not a major tragedy unless she was carrying wads of cash, but still….hello? Here’s how Sasha put it on Facebook: “You know you’re in New York when someone steals your wallet right outta your purse…”

“Are you kidding, Sasha?,” I wrote on Facebook. “An out-of-towner having her wallet stolen? That’s Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon in The Out-of-Towners. You actually did that clueless tourist thing….whoa, wait, what happened? Never coming back here again!

A guy named Todd Alcott commented, “Don’t ride the subway while chewing on a piece of hay. It’s a dead giveaway.” But the phrase that caught my attention was “right outta your purse.” How did the thief manage that?

“You’ve lived in the city, Sasha,” I wrote. “You know the realm, you’re no dummy and you’re not Thelma Kadiddlehopper from Emporia, Kansas. Always carry your wallet in a super-snug place next to your person. NEVER in a large or medium-sized, semi-open or easily-openable handbag. (Of course it was one of those two.) That’s like carrying a sign saying ‘Hello, subway pickpockets! This is your chance!”

Bernie is going to lose the California primary — agreed. But this a semi-closed primary that doesn’t allow people to vote unless they’ve registered (the deadline was 5.23) as either Democrats or “no preference” voters. Unfortunately thousands were dumb enough to register with the American Independent Party, which sounds good on the face but is actually an extreme right-wing, anti-gay party that can’t vote in the Democratic primarily. Plus there’s a sizable Latino voting bloc that’s in the Hillary camp; ditto African Americans who don’t like Bernie because he doesn’t look or talk like their kind of guy.

Five hours of the great Werner Herzog sharing experiences about narrative and documentary filmmaking online for $90…sold.

Best thought: “Don’t look into a camera — look through it.” Of course, self-explanatory — always pay attention to content more than composition. Disputed thought: “Storyboards are the refuge of cowards.” No — always storyboard, always make sure your script is as clean and tight as a drum, always prepare until you’re blue in the face. And once you’ve done all that and you begin to shoot with your actors and crew, then you can re-think it and improvise and follow freshly-hatched instincts. Always, always have a well-prepared, fully thought-out scheme in case your momentary instincts lead you into an unworthy or mediocre realm.

Hey, I could do this. Five hours of stories and life lessons from an online poet-samurai columnist who’s been through it all, played the game, not played the game, learned how to churn out thoughtful, well-sculpted daily prose without frying my brain, enjoyed moments of triumph, made a better-than-decent living, hit most of the major film festivals, whored myself out to a select few festivals in cities with attractive architecture, worshipped The Kooples, run into occasional difficulties, kissed ass, had my ass kicked, sacrificed any resemblance to an actual “life” to this obsession, restored my soul, learned to be a bulky scooter/motorcycle man, bought Italian shoes with care, dealt with the Twitter scolds and banshees, fought it out in food courts, my cup runneth over, etc.

I was bitching earlier about how some areas of Belgrade are a tiny bit ratty and rundown with altogether too much graffiti, but when you get into the upscale regions (basically in the city’s center) everything is cool, refined and approved. All the spiritual and material perks of any hip town. This is a city, remember, that had the shit bombed out of it by NATO forces from 3.26.99 thru 6.10.99. I never knew before arriving here that everything is spelled with Cyrllic script as well as the Latin alphabet. The U.S. dollar goes a long way here.

Moritz Eis gelato, Vuka Karadzica 9, Belgrade.

Banks of the Sava River — Wednesday, 5.25, 6:55 pm. Belgrade is located right at the juncture where the Sava joins the Danube.