Every time Michael Caine “disappears” into a role, he doesn’t disappear at all. Each and every time he seems to play the same guy delivering the same kind of lines with the same deliberate pacing. Especially in all those Chris Nolan films he costarred in. Caine is right up there with Chris Walken as one of most imitated actors of our time, and for good reason. But I’m getting an idea from this trailer for Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth (a.k.a. The Early Years) that the same old Caine has been disinvited. Maybe. Obviously not enough footage to fully assess, but I’m so sick of Caine’s Nolan persona and I so miss the way he was in Phillip Noyce‘s The Quiet American…let’s see what happens.

Youth is expected to be among the competitors at next month’s Cannes Film Festival.

For the last four or five years I’ve been waking myself up with Starbucks Instant, easily the equal of the finest fresh-brewed coffees and hands down the greatest tasting instant I’ve ever known. Particularly those packets of Dark Italian Roast and French Roast. I routinely take them to France because you can’t buy them there. But you can buy them in any Starbucks outlet in any state, and you used to be able to buy them in my local West Hollywood Pavilions, both on the regular coffee shelves and on mini-shelves in the independent Starbucks cafe within the store.

But starting about three weeks ago, those wood-colored cardboard containers of Italian and French Roast, which offer 12 plastic packets for $9.95, began to disappear, and in their place I began to notice these icky white-and-violet containers offering 8 packets for $6.99. I recoiled in disgust. These newbies seem designed for girly-girls. The prices are roughly proportional but why discontinue my old favorites? They’ve been a staple of my life. Why are you taking them away from me, Pavilions? Or are the Starbucks guys at fault?

Emmanuelle Bercot’s La Tete Haute, a Boyhood-resembling “dramatic comedy” (according to Allocine) about the life of a maladjusted kid from ages 6 to 18, has been chosen to open the 68th Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, 5.13. The French-produced film, which 5000 journalists are now investigating in an attempt to discern Thierry Fremaux‘s reason for picking it, will be the first female-directed film to open Cannes in 28 years, or since Diane Kurys’ A Man in Love kicked things off in ’87.

As Variety‘s Justin Chang has noted, most opening-night films have been announced before April, and if you ask me it’s always a bit of an “uh-oh” when a first-nighter is finalized this late in the game. Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, a total Cannes flop when it opened the ’07 festival, and Fernando Mierelles‘ Blindness, which underwhelmed almost everyone when it opened the following year’s festival, were announced in April.

We all understand size advantages, but the fact remains that if the ant-sized Scott Lang isn’t careful (or is unlucky or whatever) a semi-agile bad guy could squash him without breaking stride. In the delusional superhero realm, and I mean even for an overweight, flip-flop-wearing ComicCon loyalist with toenail fungus, that kind of vulnerability sounds like a problem. I’m presuming that Lang (Paul Rudd) will, like the comic-book character, maintain normal-size strength in his shrunken condition (which makes no fucking sense, by the way) but he can still end up as a micro-stain on the sole of someone’s shoe or sandal or Target-bought sneaker. Ant-Man pops on 7.17.

Asghar Farhadi‘s masterful About Elly is a little bit like Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura (’60) in that both are about a fetching, somewhat unknowable woman who disappears during a sea-air vacation among a group of liberal-minded friends in their 30s and 40s. Both films are less about what happened to the woman than the cultural values (or a lack thereof in the case of L’Avventura) that linger and fester and are studied in her absence. Both are about “now that she’s gone, who the fuck are we?”

The Antonioni was about ennui and nothingness among existential brooders while the Farhadi is mainly focused on the rigidity of Iranian cultural codes and feelings of repression and social imprisonment among some of the women. That’s how I took it, at least.

The main difference, as noted, is that Farhadi’s Iranians are living within a social system that is more or less fixed and patriarchal, and which requires obediance and even certain kinds of punishment when rules are ignored, and yet there are genuine feelings of caring and loyalty and compassion among the vacationers. Except in the case of an older, bitter husband, there’s a passionate sense of local ethics and morality here. It’s considered shocking, for one example, that a woman who was unhappily engaged to a man she didn’t love and was looking to dump would take part in a weekend vacation as a single woman…forgive us, God!

And yet in some ways these people, all from Tehran, seem just as bored and particular and frustrated and vaguely bummed out about their day-to-day as Antonioni’s Italians were over 50 years ago.

It’s smart of Hillary Clinton to co-opt Elizabeth Warren‘s message about income inequality and trying to strengthen or rejuvenate the social contact that middle-class Americans received with some abundance before the upper 1% began hijacking the economy and undermining the middle. It would be nice, also, if she would commit to working to prevent the corporate elite from vacuuming and pocketing most of the fresh revenue coming out of the currently healthy economy…but that’s probably a little too Warren-esque for Hillary to support with any conviction. She’s no populist — she’s a corporatist with a center-right bent. But she did say that it’s all about struggling middle class and “earning” their vote and whatnot. She’s wisely not projecting an air of inevitability or entitlement.

Update: Hillary Clinton‘s pre-recorded announcement that she’s running for President was, according to some media outlets, supposed to pop around noon Eastern/9 am Pacific. This was never confirmed, I realize, but it’s now 11:45 am in Los Angeles and 2:45 pm in New York. Will her web announcement appear any time soon or does her staff need a few more hours to get it together? How about 6 pm this evening? Or tomorrow morning? I don’t like her, I don’t want her…I’m stuck with her. Naturally I hope she defeats jowly Jeb Bush, but I’m not feeling the heartbeat. The only thing I really like about Hillary in the White House is Bill as First Dude.

“The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party’s barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority.” — from a 4.12 New York piece by Jonathan Chait.

Roughly four years ago I posted a little riff about Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, a longish but absorbing history of the impact of Mart Cowley‘s The Boys in the Band. It focused on Crowley’s life, the writing of the 1968 play and the huge off-Broadway success it became, the making of the William Freidkin-directed 1970 feature, and how Crowley’s life went afterwards. It reminded me of what a singular accomplishment Boys was in its day, and that the play, at least, really was a kind of gay earthquake…before anyone called anyone “gay.” I know I’m not supposed to admire the Friedkin today but it’s always been amusing and well-written, and each character is tart, particular and dimensional. I’m sorry but it’s a first-rate piece.

There was at least a little oxygen left in the room after the Robey doc. It created a little bit of a stir, and it persuaded me to re-sample the Friedkin film. I figured a Bluray would pop soon after and that would be that. But it never appeared.

Now, after four years, KI Studio Classics is issuing a Bluray on 6.16.15. The once-controversial film has been available on DVD but not as a streaming Amazon rental.

Veep meets Zero Dark Thirty meets Dr. Strangelove? HBO’s The Brink, a half-hour comedy series about clueless American foreign-intelligence types screwing things up in the Middle East, looks and sounds like my kind of deal. Jack Black, Tim Robbins and Esai Morales as the U.S. President. Costarring Orange Is the New Black‘s Pablo Schreiber and The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi. Premiering on Sunday, 6.21.

A week or two ago I bought a black Kooples T-shirt — easily the greatest T-shirt I’ve ever worn in my life. Great fibre, fits beautifully and has a two-button, leather-banded collar. It’s really heaven. I put it on and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning and just sighed — it’ll never get any better than this. Except it cost over $125, which is three times more expensive than any other T-shirt I’ve even thought about buying. (There’s a long-sleeve version that costs $250.) I love this T-shirt so much that I’m almost afraid to wear it. I don’t want to wear it out or risk spilling coffee on it or something. It’s the same principle as the middle-aged wife in Astoria who buys a couch that’s so beautiful and so expensive that she covers it with see-through plastic and tells everyone to sit somewhere else. On top of which having my Kooples T-shirt dry-cleaned costs $8 at Holloway Cleaners (the owner said they have to take extra care because of the leather collar). It’s a responsibility, this shirt.

A female producer friend mentioned this morning that she “saw a doc on cable a few years ago that interviewed male-to-female transgenders. They were asked to name the first thing they noticed in how they were treated as a woman rather than a man. They all said it was the loss of instant authority that men have in the culture. When they became women [many] men didn’t turn to look at them when they were speaking, and often didn’t acknowledge that they’d spoken at all. They said it took a while to realize that the men had heard them but had chosen to ignore them. I laughed when I heard that one.”