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.

A glimpse of the cover for a forthcoming Bluray of Harry & Son (Olive, 4.28) took me back for an instant and made me feel good that Robby Benson isn’t around anymore.  Younger moviegoers have no way of knowing what a drag it was during his late-’70s-to-mid-’80s heyday. Benson was the “up” guy who always seemed to portray gentle, earnest, open-hearted types who smiled and hugged and kept in touch with their emotions (Tribute, The Chosen, Running Brave). He was too radiant, his eyes were too blue, he smiled too much, and every time he turned up in a film I would go “oh, Christ.” Benson is now 59, still married to Karla DeVito and apparently a happy, healthy fellow. Good-looking guys always become interesting when age catches up with them. Sidenote: Has there ever been a father-son pairing more genetically disparate than Benson and Paul Newman?

I missed last Tuesday morning’s press screening of Cedric Jimenez‘s The Connection (Drafthouse, 5.15), a fact-based Gallic take on the French Connection-related, Marseille-based heroin drug trade, set in 1975. My next shot is a Friday, 4.24 showing at L.A.’s COLCOA Film Festival. And if I blow that one (I can be brilliant at missing screenings) my last shot before leaving the country is in NYC on Thursday, 5.7. “Considerable theatrical appeal in English-language territories [will be] boosted by both its art house-approved cast and the thematic tie-in to William Friedkin‘s evergreen cop film.” — from John DeFore‘s Hollywood Reporter review, filed from the Toronto Film Festival on 9.10.14.

A producer friend tells me that Todd Haynes‘ Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith‘s 1952 lesbian romance (i.e., initially published under a nom de plume and called “The Price of Salt“) is being called “the female Brokeback Mountain” by an industry crony or two and that “it’s going to get a lot of Oscar buzz early on.” She believes that Cate Blanchett, whose titular character endures most of the story’s heartache and anguish, will be a likely recipient for a Best Actress nomination. The drama will have its big debut next month at the Cannes Film Festival, and open in the fall, of course, with all the attendant Oscar hoopla. Harvey is back in the game!

Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’ Carol, which some are allegedly calling a “female Brokeback Mountain.”

The Cannes reception will have a lot to do with it, of course, but if the script is as good as my friend claims Carol could well end up as a Best Picture contender, and Haynes, who’s been churning out a string of sublimely realized, indie-level films for many years (including the fascinating Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There), could benefit from Best Director chatter. It’s certainly conceivable that Rooney Mara, who plays Carol’s love interest Therese Belivet, might also lure some heat as a Best Supporting Actress contender. Maybe. I don’t know anything.

My pally read Phillis Nagy‘s script sometime back and “loved it. It’s Cate Blanchett’s next Oscar, or at least her next Best Actress nomination. I really think I’m going to be proved right on this one. It’s a great story of a woman in a cold, affluent, unhappy marriage who sleeps around with women and decides to seduce a young engaged shopgirl — and then falls hard for her.”

It’s commonly known that “The Price of Salt” was a kind of autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley). Producer pally: “Women just had to stay hidden in the closet back then and this was Highsmith’s love story.” Or one of them, at least.

Highsmith’s Wiki page notes that “The Price of Salt” was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and that “it garnered wide attention as a lesbian novel because of its rare happy ending. Highsmith didn’t publicly associate herself with this book until late in her life, probably because she had extensively mined her personal life for the book’s content.”

Principal photography on Carol began on 3.2.14 in Cincinnati and wrapped on 4.25.14.

Blanchett and Mara during Blanchett’s big night at the 2014 Santa Barbara Film Festival.