Exactly two weeks ago (Friday, 2.24) I went to catch Jordan Peele‘s Get Out at the Pacific Grove plex. After the show mercifully ended I realized I had lost my keys somewhere between the outdoor Grove parking lot and the theatre, and it was no small loss — my Mini Cooper ignition/door key, a Yamaha Majesty ignition key plus a carrying case and chain-lock key, two apartment door keys, a laundry room and bicycle-lock key.

I got down and crawled all over the theatre floor with my iPhone flashlight on, certain that they must have fallen out. But I couldn’t find them. I whined and bitched at God, and then left my name and phone # with Pacific management. Then I gave the same info to the Grove valet desk as well as the Grove security office, which is adjacent to the Farmer’s Market grocery area. Nobody called over the next two or three days so I figured “okay, I’m fucked.”

Sometime last week I made some low-cost copies and then had to shell out $150 for two new bolt-lock apartment keys, and I would have had to pay a little more than $250 for a new Mini Cooper key. But yesterday afternoon (right after a screening of Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song) I went by the Grove to ask around again, and lo and behold the Grove plex guys had them. The sight! My eyes all but bounced out of their sockets. Elated, walking on air, shook everyone’s hand, “thank you!”, etc.

Right now this nightmare of a Lamborghini is sitting adjacent to the valet desk at the Grove parking lot. There are no cultured, book-reading, Ivy League-educated fellows from the Middle Atlantic or New England states who would even sit behind the wheel of such a monstrosity, much less drive or buy one. Cars of this sort are made for no-class, taste-free Middle Eastern guys with too much money (Iranians, Saudi Arabians), Russian mafia operatives or socially insecure bling-wearing hip-hop artists.

The black guys who were hired to play Skull Island natives in the original King Kong (1933) were outraged, of course, at the coarse racist characterizations they were forced to go along with. They were men with families and responsibilities and traffic tickets to pay, but they had to suffer the humiliation in order to collect their SAG minimums. Demonic Kong directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack cackled with glee at the grass skirts, spears and animal-bone necklaces these proud men were forced to wear.

A 1936 CBS Radio reading of Robert Sherwood, Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves’ script The Petrified Forest, sometime after the 2.6.36 debut of Archie Mayo’s film version.

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HE to Rian Johnson: What are your thoughts, brah? Did it raise a smirk of any kind, or are you too busy in editing? I realize it doesn’t have the same visceral impact as Luke Skywalker telling Rey to “eat my ass,” but that aside…well, this is our life, isn’t it? Everyone is making The Last Jedi right along with you. It’s a community effort. You can’t expect to just spring your movie on the world next December and expect the fans to just go “oh, wow….Rian, you’ve changed our lives!”

This drearily synthetic “meet Walter” piece, a promotion for Alien: Covenant (20th Century Fox, 5.19), was conceived by Ridley Scott and 3AM, directed by Luke Scott and produced by RSA Films. What horsehit…a perfume commercial! Why didn’t they use Rihanna or Beyonce as the nurse-surgeons? The Alien: Covenant buzz has just taken a nosedive.

The following is the final line from Manohla Dargis‘ N.Y. Times review of Kong: Skull Island, 90% of which reads like a spirited, half-joyous rave: “Alas, beauty no longer has her beast, the beast no longer has his beauty and this darkness has no heart even if it will have a sequel.”

While the Apocalypse Now echoes are incessant and Kong: Skull Island is clearly paying tribute to the jungle-thrills portion of the original King Kong, it is more similar to the friendly-monkey tone of Son of Kong. Why am I the only one saying this? King Kong was a tragedy about the perversion of naturalism and the heartbreak of obsessive love while the lightweight Son of Kong was mostly about goofy adventures on Skull Island and the making of a fast buck. The previous 12 words are as precise a description of Kong: Skull Island as you could possibly come up with.

Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, HE’s favorite 2017 film hands down, has opened to largely favorable reviews — currently at 77% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. A 67% or 71% rating means a modest degree of difficulty, but 77% basically means that a film has been judged as very, very good except for the complaints of naysayers who don’t or can’t get it.

I was blown away in particular by Tony Scott’s beyond-brilliant N.Y. Times review. It’s so on-target and revelatory that I felt spellbound as I read it. Scott doesn’t just understand and accept this immaculate and mesmerizing film; it’s almost as if he wrote or directed it himself and has taken to reviewing to explain it to the pissheads and tomato-throwers.

Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper.

The “perpetually displaced nomad set” amid “the drift and mystery of modern life”…yes!

Read it on the Times site or here in its entirety, but this is about as bull’s-eye as it gets:

“Like many other characters in the films of Olivier Assayas, Maureen, a young American woman living in France, belongs to a relatively privileged slice of the international nomad class. The old-fashioned term ‘jet set,’ with its connotations of glamorous indolence, doesn’t quite fit. Mr. Assayas’s world is populated by figures in perpetual transit: actors, corporate executives, terrorists. Their identities have been dissolved by perpetual displacement. We remember their faces (which are often the faces of movie stars), even if we’re not quite sure who they are.

“Maureen, who works as a personal shopper for a spoiled celebrity named Kyra, certainly brushes up against glamour, and occasionally tries on a piece of Kyra’s borrowed couture. But she dwells mostly in a benumbed, stressed-out limbo, in frenzied motion from one nowhere to the next. Her human connections are often mediated by screens. She video-chats with her boyfriend, a tech consultant on assignment in Oman. She exchanges feverish texts with a stranger on a train from Paris to London and back. When asked what she’s doing in Paris, Maureen answers, ‘I’m waiting.’

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In just under three months the 50th anniversary of the 6.1.67 debut of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will be upon us. A half-fucking-century ago. The first Beatle event that shocked boomers worldwide was when John Lennon died — 12.8.80. Methinks Pepper‘s 50th will register as a similar jolt. There’s no stopping time, but I wish there was some way to slow it down a bit.

If Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.10) turns out to be a critical bust, will his string have finally run out? In the view of the Guardian‘s Danny Leigh, quite possibly. “Of course, there are diehards to whom [Malick] remains sacred,” he writes. “For a certain kind of movie star too, he is still the one director for whom they will risk the raw indignity of being dropped from the finished film.”

But truth be told, The Tree of Life (’11) is the last film in which Malick got away with his darting, flakey-mystical, twirling-barefoot-maiden Emmanuel Lubezki bullshit. The critical deaths of To The Wonder and Knight of Cups within the last four and a half years have taken their toll on Malick’s rep. “The catcalls have increased,” Leigh writes, “[and] the graph of public opinion has become a ski-slope.”

3.9 comment from HE reader “JR”: “What has Malick done since his hiatus? Gone into the same well of voice-over, nature porn, floating camera, natural light, running water, whispering, twirling camera bullshit, no script…hoping Emmanuel Lubezki‘s gorgeous cinematography would save him from not having a story. He doesn’t have anything else. He’s 70 so he’s not going to change or try NEW things, he sure as hell isn’t going to get better because he’s set in his ways, so he’s going to rehash his old tricks, being abhorrently inferior to his past greatness, trotting along on the endless road of self-parody.”

“All Hail Bert Schneider,” posted on 12.13.11: “Bert Schneider was the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies, and [in so doing] persuaded Malick to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes. After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the ’90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.”

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Four days in Paris for the purposes of general chilling + adjusting to European time before taking the train to Cannes. 40 rue de Saintonge — Friday, 5.12 thru Tuesday morning, 5.16.

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Someone — Variety‘s Will Thorne, to be exact — has finally adopted the Hollywood Elsewhere term for Kong: Skull Island. “With ’70s rock tunes blaring and the dark figure of a life-sized King Kong looming in the background,” Thorne wrote today, “Wednesday night’s L.A. premiere truly felt like Apocalypse Kong.”

But director Jordan Vogt-Roberts flat-out misinforms when he calls his film “Apocalypse Now meets King Kong, this idea of a Vietnam War movie mixed with a creature feature.” 

As I said yesterday, the 120-foot tall ape in Kong: Skull Island is more or less human-friendly (except when it comes to Samuel L. Jackson‘s asshole Army guy or being attacked by military helicopters) and is much closer in temperament to the 15-foot-tall gray ape in Son of Kong, the 1933 sequel.

Filed by N.Y. Times Coral Davenport earlier today: “Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the global scientific consensus on climate change.

“Speaking of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, Pruitt told CNBC’s Squawk Box that ‘I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

Just so we’re clear: Pruitt is a shill for the fossil-fuel industry — a kneepad-wearing fellating whore.

“’But we don’t know that yet,’ he added. ‘We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

“Pruitt’s statement is not consistent with scientific research on climate change, including decades of research by federal agencies. His remarks may also put him in conflict with laws and regulations his agency is charged with enforcing.”

Focus Features p.r. chief Adriene Bowles has a new gig as president of publicity for Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures. I sent her a congrats along with a question about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Untitled Detroit Riots Project, on which she’ll be riding shotgun.

“Good for you, Adriene, but why is Annapurna releasing Untitled Detroit Riots on 8.4.17?

“You can’t say ‘because it’ll be the 50-year anniversary of the start of the ’67 Detroit riots’ because (a) 8.4.17 isn’t the anniversary of anything plus (b) nobody cares about the damn anniversary anyway. The Detroit riots were over and done with on 8.4.67. They ignited on 7.23.67 and ended on 7.27.67 so the half-century anniversary is smoke.

“Three interpretations: (a) Detroit Riots is a good movie-movie and not an award-season thing, and that’s cool — nothing wrong with being a solid people-level thing; (b) Detroit Riots is an award-season thing but Annapurna is looking to throw out or more precisely defy the rulebook by ignoring the traditional Venice-Telluride-Toronto scheme but scoring nominations regardless; or (c) Annapurna would rather go for the late-summer revenue potential than endure the award-season gauntlet, which is another way of saying that (a) is the basic reality.”