Daniel Espinosa‘s Child 44 deserves points for investing in historical realism (1953 Soviet Russia) while telling a murder-mystery tale, but it’s way too slow and long and grim. And my God, the whitewalls! The exact same Hitler Youth haircuts that were surrounding me at Whole Foods the other day are worn by Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Joel Kinnaman and Vincent Cassell, among others. The bottom line is that you just don’t want to “be” in this film. There’s no disputing that Stalin’s Russia was a relentlessly gray, morose and repressive place, but who wants to spend two hours and 17 minutes in the hell-hole of Child 44? It’s all about Hardy’s Leo Demidov, a deposed Ministry of State Security agent, trying to catch a serial child killer, but while catching or killing this monster will obviously save children’s lives, it won’t make any difference to anyone else. After a half-hour or so I was feeling a profound longing to escape from Child 44, but I had another 90 minutes to go. After 45 minutes I stretched out on the seats and caught a 20-minute nap. But I caught the last hour’s worth.

I’ve written a couple of times about the currently filming remake of Ben-Hur (Paramount, 2.26.16), which is being directed by Russian low-life Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). In a recently posted chat with Immersed in Movies’ Bill Desowitz, Bekmambetov indicates that in some respects Ben-Hur “will be just as edgy and cutting edge as Unfriended,” which Bekmambetov produced. The Russian helmer makes it especially clear that his version of the chariot-race sequence will be markedly different than William Wyler’s.

Jack Huston (Judah Ben-Hur) and Nazanin Boniadi (Esther) during filming of Timur Bekmambetov’s Christian-pandering Ben-Hur.

“I’m using more of YouTube videos to find ideas and style for the camera work and how people behave,” the director said. “The chariot race today is like Formula 1. It’s a different technique, with a lot of whip pans and zooming [and VFX by Mr. X].” Desowitz mentions that “there’s an assortment of digital cameras being used on the movie — Red, Alexa, GoPro.”

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Josh Trank‘s Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox, 8.7) is a franchise reboot and the first grade-A film based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s 54 year-old Marvel comic book. Are Marvel superhero flicks about anything other than the making of money? Anything at all? Do they contain any echoes or metaphors about some aspect of 21st Century life, which the X-Men films had before Brett Ratner came along? Two reasons for concern: (a) one of the producers is Matthew Vaughn, which indicates that the film might have the same tone of cheap, candy-realm escapism as Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service; and (b) Fantastic Four was shot in Louisiana, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll have that craven “shot on a budget in Louisiana” vibe…but it might.

Matteo Garrone‘s The Tale of Tales, an English-language adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s same-titled fairy-tale omnibus (a.k.a., “Il racconto dei racconti”), will screen at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. The phrase that comes to mind off the top of my head is Garrone’s Satyricon minus the sex. The full title of a recent edition of Basile’s book includes the phrase “entertainment for little ones.” The Wiki page says Gerrone was drawn to Basile’s stories “for their mix of the real and the unreal, and because he found the themes in many of them to still be highly relevant.”

HE to Immersed In Movies’ Bill Desowitz: “You wrote the other day about the new IMAX laser projection system, which was demonstrated in Los Angeles a few days ago. There’s also Dolby Vision, of course. So is the competition mainly between IMAX laser and Dolby Vision, or is it more of a three-way if you thrown in the Barco DP4K-60L laser projector? Is there an overlap here? Or is the IMAX laser projection strictly IMAX-centric with the other two duking it out in non-IMAX theatres? I’m confused.”

Desowitz back to HE: “I don’t know how Dolby and Barco differ, but IMAX stressed at the demo that their design breaks from the industry standard of using prims and xenon bulbs, which they believe sets them apart along with now filling the big screen without aspect ratio limitations (the featurette explains some of the tech). What I saw was very impressive. But yes, there appears to be three competitors. I need to find out about 60 frames from IMAX, which would allow them to show the upcoming Avatar films as well, which likely will be shown at 60 fps.”

Most of the time I wash the car at one of those do-it-yourself, compressed-water-spray operations that cost about three bills. They also have quarter-in-the-slot vacuum deals. But every so often I splurge on a bells-and-whistles car wash facility. There’s one on the west side of La Cienega and just south of Melrose, called Royal Car Wash, that I visited today. I was there for only about 25 or 30 minutes and two unfortunate things happened in that time slot — (a) a case of sexual favoritism that I took exception to and (b) a bearish, gray-haired guy who moaned and “ahhh”-ed too loudly when he was in one of those quarter-in-the-slot massage chairs.

I was getting a massage myself in the chair right behind this guy and probably enjoyed it just as much, but being a New Jersey/Connecticut WASP, I hold that shit in. I really love it when those machine-fingers start working on my lower backbone but I don’t let go with “aaaahhh, God!,” “Aahhwwww!,” “Oh, Jesus…oh man, I don’t believe this!” and so on. His moans were so appalling I was starting to feel badly about experiencing the same device. You’re lowering the property values, dude.  If I hadn’t been facing the opposite direction I would’ve given him the old stink-eye. So many people treat public areas like their living rooms or bathrooms.

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Press screenings of Child 44 and Unfriended happened last Tuesday (the former at 3 pm, the latter at 7 pm), and I missed them both. Naturally. God help me but I’m thinking about catching both today. Unfriended and Child 44 have 65% and 27% Rotten Tomato ratings, respectively.  Neither are likely to be pleasant experiences. Honestly? The more I think about this, the weaker in the knees I’m getting. One or the other, but not in tandem.  I need to man up or cut bait.  This is my life.  This is April.

Here’s a start-to-finish video of Thursday’s Stars Wars Celebration panel with The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams, producer Kathy Kennedy and moderator Anthony Breznican of Entertainment Weekly. The show doesn’t begin until the five-minute mark. You will note that Abrams and Breznican are not wearing a Hitler Youth cut.

I don’t see how I can justify posting the full-boat trailer for Rick Famuyiwa‘s Dope (Open Road, 6.30) given my posting the teaser on 3.26 on top of reviewing (i.e., half-trashing) it a couple of times during Sundance ’15. I suppose the fact that the trailer is first-rate — nicely cut, timed, shaped and tone-hinted — is justification in itself. My view, to repeat, is that “for all its keep-it-comin’ energy Dope is “a fleet, Tarantino-like hodgepodge of fantasy bullshit in the vein of a New Line Cinema release from the ’90s (i.e., House Party), and adapted to the general sensibility of 2015. It’s fun as far as it goes but definitely not that great. An awful lot of tragically hip critics flipped for it at Sundance.

A couple of hours ago I was sitting at one of the picnic tables outside of the Whole Foods market at Fairfax and Santa Monica, and all of a sudden I noticed that every guy sitting at every table nearby was wearing a Hitler Youth cut (i.e., Brad Pitt whitewalls with short sprigs on top). The crowd doesn’t get much hipper than at Whole Foods, so this means pretty much every guy in West Hollywood, gay or straight, is wearing one. Except for guys like me, of course.

A year ago Jezebel‘s Kate Spries posted a piece called “Every Dude You Know Is Getting This Haircut,” but these trends take time. Now even the laggers have caught on. My son Jett has been wearing a slightly longer variation. Even David Poland (whom I saw last night at a Far From The Madding Crowd screening on the Fox lot) is sporting what you could call an Almost Hitler Youth cut, or at least a quite short one.

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Take away the media-conversation-attacks-Superman element and you’re basically left with another moody, noirish superhero melodrama with the same gloom-and-doom soundtrack, and a lot of slugging and groaning and Gold’s Gym pecs, and a lot of cars and buildings and whatnot sure to be left in rubble by the end of the third act. And the fanboys are going “whoa…a new approach to the same old superhero horseshit!”

“A digital copy of a movie carries no history. It’s clean and new every time. It has no memory, and it has no soul.” — Projectionist Stephen Bognar in a 4.14 N.Y. Times op-ed about the dying of 35mm, titled “The Last Reel.”

“A 35mm print of a movie often carries history, much of it in the form of scratches, tears, missing frames, green lines, pops, reel-change marks and faded colors or weak, washed-out values when the film is in black-and-white. It looks flawed and worn-down and a little more diminished every time it’s shown. It has too much memory, and a soul that I would have to call worthless at this stage of the game. With any luck I’ve watched my last 35mm-projected film.” — Me, speaking right now as I sit in front of my 60-inch Samsung watching an absolutely perfect digital rendering of Sir Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out.