Florence Foster Jenkins‘ costar Simon Helberg, whose highly amusing performance as a self-deluding pianist should have been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, was the funniest and most engaging of the SBIFF Virtuosos who were honored last night. The Big Bang Theory star was in his element and smooth as silk. Helberg is more of a witty ensemble guy than a lead, but he really needs to keep appearing in quality features.

virtuosos ensemble

The warmest vibes came from Fences and Manchester by The Sea costar Stephen Henderson and Moonlight and Hidden Figures costar Mahershala Ali. The biggest applause machine was Lion‘s Dev Patel. Loving‘s Ruth Negga, Hidden Figures and Moonlight costar Janelle Monae and Moonlight costar Naomie Harris more than held their own.

I’m not a fan of Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s absurdly demonic performance in Nocturnal Animals, and I was stunned when he recently won the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for this.  So I mostly just waited for his interview to be over. For what it’s worth I loved him in Anna Karenina.

The charming and smoothly disciplined Dave Karger (Today, TCM) handled his moderator task with the usual aplomb.

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Four years, 10 months and 15 days ago I embraced sobriety. Was this because I had a serious drinking problem? No — it was because a voice told me that if I continued to pour wine and beer into my system on a nightly basis (I quit the hard stuff in ’96) I might eventually come to resemble the present-day Steven Bannon. Honestly? If I did look like Bannon, if I saw that grotesque Luciferian puss in my mirror every morning, I would be sorely tempted to put a glock in my mouth and pull the trigger. [Apologies for accidentally wiping an earlier version of this post — I don’t know what the hell happened.]

A Melissa McCarthy classic — cheers, brilliant, “everyone was happy!”…surreal. Ditto Kate McKinnon‘s Betsy DeVos.

It struck me earlier today that Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea is similar to Martin Ritt‘s Hud in that the lead protagonist doesn’t find salvation or redemption at the finale — no healing and certainly no parting of the clouds. What other films have a main protagonist who can’t find a way out of the pit or doesn’t care to find one, who finally says “aahh, the hell with it…I am who I am”?

From Hud Wikipage: “Paramount executives were unhappy with the film. They felt it was too dark; they were displeased by James Wong Howe‘s black-and-white cinematography and Hud’s lack of remorse and unchanged behavior at the finale. 

“After Hud was previewed, Paramount considered dropping the project, feeling that it was not ‘commercial enough.’ But director Martin Ritt flew to New York and convinced the executives to release the film unmodified.

“Hud was acclaimed during its premiere at the 24th Venice International Film Festival. After opening on 5.29.63 it grossed $10 million, earning $5 million in theatrical rentals against a budget of $2.35 million.

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This Mercedes AMG GT Roadster spot is okay, I guess, in a dopey, broadly satirical sort of way, but what’s happened to the Coen brothers? I’m asking because after Peter Fonda turns over the engine there’s an insert shot of a couple of full glasses of beer shuddering so badly they nearly tip over. That’s not cool, not the Coen brothers style. The Coens of yore would have shown a closeup of the beers vibrating ever so slightly without the glasses moving — still a bullshit notion but it would have passed muster. Comment #2: A single Mercedes “blocks in” motorcycles belonging to…what, at least 12 or 15 bikers? Comment #3: Fonda could use a little neck-wattle surgery and a thousand micro-hair-plug grafts. He needs to at least try to look like Terry Valentine again. Aging is inevitable, but you can at least make an effort to shave a decade or so.

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For all those HE commenters who’ve incorrectly claimed that Real Time‘s Bill Maher and author-neuroscientist Sam Harris had somehow supported or aligned themselves with Trump’s Muslim travel ban, here are the facts. In passing: A 6.14.16 Washington Post story by Philip Bump attempted to calculate how many terrorists the Bush and Obama administrations have each killed. It was estimated that former President Barack Obama is responsible for having sent between 30,000 and 33,000 terrorists to Allah.

Hats off to Santa Barbara Film Festival exec director Roger Durling for generating an easy, amusing interview vibe last night with La La Land costars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone at the Arlington theatre. Alpha alfalfa adoration vibes…love love love. Everyone enjoyed it. That said, the chat lasted over two hours, which is a half-hour too long. 90 minutes should more than suffice. Incidentally: An HE salute to the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s tech team for turning around high-quality video clips of the previous night’s tribute the next morning. This has never happened before — I for one am seriously impressed.

A photo call moment following last night’s SBIFF tribute to La La Land‘s Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. They are flanked by director-writer Damian Chazelle (r.) and SBIFF exec director Roger Durling (l.)

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The IMDb, the Amazon-owned website that provides movie/TV production and distribution data (along with celebrity news content), has decided to shut down its message boards because they’re “no longer providing a positive, useful experience” for the vast majority of its users. What’s this about? Concerns about trolling, obviously, but that’s the internet — often rude, unruly, sometimes odious or even hateful. But it’s the stuff of freedom.

This is obviously a bad thing but what brought this about? What exactly was the straw that broke the camel’s back?

IMDb message posted today: “As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb’s message boards on February 20, 2017. We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.”

Don’t ask how or why, but I’m currently persuaded that the cleaning staff at the Fess Parker Doubletree has either stolen or diabolically hidden my Gillette Fusion Proshield razor. Remember that scene in Elaine May‘s The Heartbreak Kid when Charles Grodin gets angry at a hotel waiter when he’s told that they’ve run out of pecan pie? That’s me right now with the Fess Parker guys. They have my razor…I know they do!

Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Netflix, likely spring release) is based upon Luong Ung’s 16-year-old book of the same name. It seems to be basically a back-to-the-Killing Fields piece about the Khymer Rouge Cambodian genocide of the mid to late ’70s. Pic will chronicle Loung Ung’s “early childhood in Cambodia as a five-year-old girl who witnessed firsthand the brutal and murderous tactics of the genocidal Pol Pot regime,” etc. Joilie is obviously obsessed with the idea of horrific punishment and torture visited upon innocents, which she explored previously in In The Land of Blood and Honey, which was about the Serbian genocide of the ’90s, as well as Unbroken. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Jolie is privately into bondage and discipline, which a friend confided to me three or four years ago.