Jimmy Fallon, who will emcee tomorrow night’s Golden Globes award telecast, will be on Hollywood Elsewhere’s shit list for the foreseeable future (forever?), and I’ve mentioned him in this context so many times I don’t think I need to explain it again.

Suffice that I agree with a 1.7 Toronto Star article by columnist Vinay Menon, titled “Frat Boy Jimmy Fallon’s Bland Charm Is Rapidly Wearing Thin“:

“[Perhaps] you already know what to expect [tomorrow night]: a star-studded opening number with ambitious tracking shots, singing, dancing, costumes, impressions, fawning odes to the nominees, silly audience play, and scattershot jokes in which the punch lines are never more than gentle pokes.

“This instinct is coded inside Fallon’s DNA. He’s the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show. He’s the ratings leader. He’s a television star in his own right. But more than anything, he is Hollywood’s No. 1 fan, a man-boy saddled with a pop culture obsession who believes life is a karaoke machine inside a frat house where everything is awesome and everyone plays board games before pounding back midnight shots from the fountain of youth and declaring mad love for one another.

“In this cloud of arrested development, Fallon is the affable ringleader. He hugs. He high-fives. He giggles. He claps like a trained seal. He never offends.

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Emma Stone’s handlers won’t admit it, but one of the motives behind this Rolling Stone cover is to appeal to the Academy’s geezer horndogs. Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has said time and again that this voting bloc often (always?) votes for the Best Actress nominee who looks the hottest. Not my notion — just an apparent fact of life.

My La La Land Bluray arrived yesterday — thank you, powers-that-be!

The storied Formosa Cafe, which has been in operation since 1939, shut its doors about two weeks ago, according to a just-posted L.A. Weekly article by Dennis Romero. The venue’s license was suspended in October due to unpaid taxes, Romero reports. The real reason, I suspect, is the big expanded shopping area that was built to the east of the Formosa, which has drawn most of the foot traffic. The Formosa is as important to Los Angeles culture as the Pacific Ocean, Venice Beach, the Hollywood Bowl, Mulholland Drive, Stone Canyon and Disney Hall. It’s a major tragedy to lose places with this kind of history, charm and character, but L.A. does this all the time. I went down to Santa Monica Blvd. and Formosa Ave. last night to see it with my own eyes. It’s dark, all right — a sarcophagus. Then again someone might come along and re-open the place. Maybe.

On top of the Formosa closing my favorite Vietnamese restaurants, both under the moniker of 9021Pho, have also shuttered. Both branches (one in Beverly Hills, the other at 7950 Sunset near Fairfax) went suddenly dark within the last week or so. The website says there are also 9021Phos in Sherman Oaks and Glendale — I don’t know what their situation is.

Richard Ladkani and Kief Davidson, co-directors of The Ivory Game, a respected Netflix doc about the ongoing assault on African elephants and their possible extinction, at last Wednesday night’s reception in Beverly Hills. Pic is on the Academy’s doc shortlist and is naturally hoping to become one of the five nominees. The Ivory Game is more timely now that China has put an official timeline on ending sale of ivory. For decades China has been the biggest market for ivory, which is principally harvested with the killing of elephants and chopping off their tusks, but on 12.29 or thereabouts it announced a plan to phase out all ivory processing and trade by the end of 2017.

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From Maureen Dowd‘s 1.7 N.Y. Times column, “White House Red Scare”: “The capital has never been more anxious about its own government. The town is suffering pre-traumatic stress disorder. This guy is really going to be president. No one knows what is going to happen, but they know it will be utter chaos and that the old familiar ways have vaporized.

“The city has the panicked air of a B-horror movie where the townsfolk stand stock still, bug-eyed and frozen, too frightened to flee, waiting for the creature.”

Hell-bent terrorists aren’t stupid, and they know what an opportunity they’ll soon have. Their goal is to provoke the U.S. into such a rage that the wrath of the powers-that-be will descend upon the Islamic-Muslim community like nothing seen before and create a U.S. vs. Islam war, and they know that Trump and his hair-trigger appointees are perfect foils in this regard. Another terrible attack is almost certainly going to happen, and when it does…God help us. Along with all the other horrors (climate destruction, diminishment of health care, Russian alliance) that are waiting in the wings.

A friend forwarded a piece (which I won’t link to) written by a “pissed-off liberal” about being flooded with emotional melt-down memories of ’60s nirvana days. “An earnestly felt if overwritten first paragraph,” I replied, “and then the piece devolves into the usual litany of cliches. No sober perspective, no ‘I can see clearly now’ assessments”…just a dreamy memory pool.

“No, it wasn’t that either…it was ’66 and half of ’67. That’s all it was.” — Lem Dobbs line from The Limey, as spoken by Peter Fonda.

Dobbs was saying that the ‘mid ’60s current was serene and cosmic and gentle and heavenly when the hippie thing first hatched in early ’66 (if you lived in really charmed circles the seeds were discernible in ’65) but it got worse and worse as it spread out from the charmed realms and elite circles (musicians, academics, writers, poets, adventurers) and filtered down into the broader social realm. The spiritual elan and property values began to fall and fall along with the hygiene levels.

“Spare change, man?”

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27 members of the august National Society of Film Critics have given their Best Picture award to Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight — a nicely woven, entirely admirable small-scale drama about timidity, cowering, sexuality, nurturing and acceptance. Never saw that one coming! The critical dweeb elite has been creaming over this film since Telluride, and there’s nothing wrong with their having done so. The film is good, Barry is cool, the A24 guys have refined taste buds, etc.

But a bigger headline is the fact that the NSFC has given the great Isabelle Huppert its Best Actress award for her performances in Elle and Things To Come. Huppert power! The Best Actress runner-ups were 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening and Toni Erdmann‘s Sandra Huller (who’s actually quite good in an otherwise mostly tiresome film).

And — surprise of surprises! — the Viola Davis inevitability factor in the Best Supporting Actress race has been temporarily halted by the NSFC’s decision to give their trophy to Manchester By The Sea‘s Michelle Williams…amazing! Not to mention richly deserved. Almost every other critics org (except for those eccentric, food-obsessed LAFCA guys, who went for Certain Women‘s Lily Gladstone along with maybe two or three other outliers) has bowed down to the Davis blitzkrieg.

The NSFC’s Best Supporting Actress runners-up were Gladstone and Moonlight‘s Naomi Harris.

Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck — undimmed, unbowed, inevitable — has won the NSFC’s Best Actor trophy. Fences‘ Denzel Washington and Paterson‘s Adam Driver were first and second runners-up.

Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali continues to run the table with this, his latest Best Supporting Actor trophy, which, boiled down, is basically about giving “Little” a swimming lesson in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Miami. Good dad, kindly nurturer, gentle vibes…Ali wins. (And Manchester‘s Lucas Hedges, who gave the year’s best supporting performance, wins zip.)

The NSFC’s Best Supporting runners-up are Hell or High Water‘s Jeff Bridges followed by Nocturnal Animals‘ Michael Shannon.

Manchester By The Sea‘s Kenneth Lonergan has won their Best Screenplay award with Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins and Hell or High Water‘s Taylor Sheridan occupying the first and second runners-up positions.

Moonlight‘s James Laxton has won the NSFC’s Best Cinematography award. The runners-up are La La Land‘s Linus Sandgren and Silence‘s Rodrigo Prieto (bravo!).

In a pinch I could maybe, possibly have sex with a warm, oven-heated apple pie (or a pumpkin or pecan pie), but never, ever would I get down with a piece of mushy fruit. Because of the possibility of stinging pain caused by citrusy, acidic juices…hello?

For some reason this doesn’t stop Elio, a 17 year-old twink type from a wealthy Italian family, in Andre Aciman‘s “Call Me By Your Name“, a 2007 gay romance novel that is well respected by critics and celebrated in gay circles. And so Elio fucks a cut-open peach. Moreover, after Elio is “finished” with it, he gives the peach to Oliver, his object of off-and-on romantic obsession, and Oliver wolfs it down, slurpy juices and all. Or something like that.

Call Me By Your Name costars Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet.

Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino.

This is one reason, at least, why Luca Guadagnino‘s film adaptation of Aciman’s book, which costars Armie Hammer as Oliver and Timothee Chalamet as Elio, is currently a hot topic of conversation.

Call Me By Your Name will premiere a little more than two weeks hence at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

The film is said to be Brokeback Mountain-ish — sexually frank but at the same time a refined, emotionally affecting period drama set in Italy. Maybe a little Luchino Visconti-ish, maybe a touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini…who knows? The screenplay is coauthored by Guadagnino (who directed last year’s A Bigger Splash and who also has a remake of Suspiria in the pipeline), James Ivory and Walter Fasano.

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The jacket art for the new British Panic In The Streets Bluray (Signal One, 4.17) is not only 18 times better than the cover art for the domestic version (which popped on 3.26.13), but good enough to buy as a framed poster if I could find it somewhere. And yet I’ve never cared for the film itself. (I tried watching it last year and gradually went “meh” and turned it off.) This triggered an idea about inspired poster art being better than the film it’s selling. There are hundreds of examples, surely, but please submit titles along with the poster art in question. And while we’re at it, name some films that are indisputably great but were never promoted with a decent visual concept.

I had never seen this TFH piece until an hour ago, and it told me something I’d never heard or read about. Which is that an early version of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Alex North’s score was tested in Times Square’s Astor theatre, and that it didn’t play all that well. Which inspired a despondent Stanley Kubrick to walk up to a Sam Goody‘s and buy albums of classical and experimental music in order to choose musical tracks to replace North’s score with. Presumably John Landis researched this tale before taping, but does this story square with what the HE readership has read?

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Apology: Late this morning I accidentally zotzed this post without realizing it. Comments about the previous iteration can be found under “Communion With Walter Chalmers.”

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted about La La Land‘s likely home court advantage in terms of Oscar noms and awards. Feinberg wrote this article as a kind of thumbs-up, back-pat gesture to Team La La, but it actually implies that Damian Chazelle‘s well-admired musical is a bit of a banality. Which I don’t feel is true — I’m saying that Feinberg’s piece kinda suggests this.

Feinberg’s supposition is that residents of Los Angeles (i.e., where most Academy and guild members live) “get” La La Land as a familiar tale happening on home turf, and that as long as a movie in question presents a mostly positive, upbeat, alpha-vibey representation of Los Angeles and movie culture in particular (as La La Land does), the odds favor a win or two.

But the very finest Los Angeles-set films, of course, have never been alpha-vibey. They’ve all been about crime, smog, corruption, fallen angels, moral ambiguity and existential drift.

A few of the best in this realm are John Boorman‘s Point Blank, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye, Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski, Frank Perry‘s Play It As It Lays, Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment, Howard Hawks‘ The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Richard Fleischer‘s The New Centurions, Joel Schumacher‘s Falling Down, William Wellman and George Cukor‘s versions of A Star Is Born and John Schlesinger‘s The Day of the Locust. Others?

Feinberg mentions a few downbeat but highly regarded L.A-set films that received no Best Picture nominations — Easy Rider (drug dealing), The Player (glib concepts, shallow manipulations, an impulsive murder of a screenwriter), Mulholland Drive (dreamscape horrors, mental afllictions, hot lezzy sex scene), Training Day (LAPD corruption), Nightcrawler (cutthroat video paparazzi) and Straight Outta Compton (racial tensions).

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I haven’t seen either of these films on a really big, well-lighted screen…ever? Absorbing the classic 1960 John Sturges western will help to flush out memories of Antoine Fuqua’s remake, and as for Bullitt….well, I need to light a small candle for poor Robert Vaughn, who passed just after the election of Donald Trump, as well as Walter Chalmers — a name that will live in my head until my dying day and probably beyond that.

Trump’s response to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln: “Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s piss-poor Apprentice ratings make him look like a serious loser and not, frankly, someone I’d want to be associated all that much if at all (DJT only hangs with winners and/or billionaires), his respect for President Lincoln and particularly his idea about friendship and affection is fantastic…really really fantastic. I’m thinking in particular of my wonderful, wonderful friendship with Kanye West, who’s a great American.

“I’m not sure what ‘mystic chords of memory’ actually means but I like the sound of it. You know me — if a little bit of that A. Lincoln schwing can rub off on DJT, I’m all for it. I’m also for honoring and preserving Mr. Lincoln’s union. Reviving and rebirthing it, I mean, in a literal demographic sense. For alt-right values are surely American values — the better angels of our nature! Winning!”