I was thinking about crashing around 11 pm last night, or about 90 minutes earlier than usual, but then I decided to watch a little bit of Jonathan Demme‘s Philadelphia (’93), which is streaming in high-def for Amazon Prime subscribers. I hadn’t watched it in 21 and 1/3 years, and I’d forgotten many of the excellent scenes and the unforced, mild-mannered way in which they sink in and connect. I wound up watching the whole thing and staying up until 1:15 am.

I remember that soon after Philadelphia opened in December 1993 (when Hillary was in the White House!) it fell out of favor in foo-foo circles for what was regarded as a too-chaste portrayal of the relationship between Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas. But the widespread affection for Hanks’ performance as Andy, the gradually dying AIDS victim, was overwhelming. It was a dignified, carefully measured performance with the weight loss and the vulnerability and the make-up, and sad as hell. Everyone knew he’d win the Best Actor Oscar, and of course he did.

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Last night I watched about two-thirds of Furious 7 in a D-BOX seat at the TCL Chinese plex, and I found it mostly pleasing. It’s basically a high-tech chair that rumbles and vibrates and pitches around in synch with the action. You could describe the D-BOX experience as a slightly less dynamic cousin of the 4DX experience, a South Korean-developed system that augments the vibration and movement with atmospheric effects. 4DX is available worldwide (including Vietnam) but it may not be in U.S. theatres for another year or two.

My D-BOX experience happened during a 7 pm screening inside theatre #1. The cacophonous Avengers: Age of Ultron premiere was occuring outside on Hollywood Blvd. and inside the adjacent Dolby theatre. A friend has told me I’m going to hate, hate, hate this Joss Whedon-directed Disney release, which screened last weekend for the junket whores.

I can’t believe I’ve now watched portions of Furious 7 in three different theatres so far. I’ve now seen the completely sub-mental Abu Dhabi sequence. Are you reading this, Michael Moses?

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Directors, fight choreographers and editors of all of those Marvel and D.C. Comics superhero features (along with evil Furious 7 director James Wan) need to pull up a chair and watch this one-take Daredevil fight scene and take copious notes, and then bow down in front of series creator Drew Goddard. Brilliant! HE gold standard! The cinematographer is Matt Lloyd. As per House of Cards tradition, all 13 episodes of Daredevil began airing four days ago (i.e., 4.10).

From HE reader Matt Howell: “Given your hatred of the comic book genre and your lament over action scenes and fight choreography being unrealistic, what’s your take on this clip? Those are real looking blows, struck by a progressively more beaten down and winded hero. Bad guys don’t go down with one punch and stay down, they get back up and come back at him (albeit a little slower and in pain). Oh yeah, and it’s all one take.”

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Jon Stewart is saying that Hillary Clinton‘s “it’s not about me but you” announcement video hits the right notes, but the piece felt a bit too orchestrated and prepared and stage-managed — the sentiments and feelings were fine but they didn’t feel all that genuine. Her “did you know I’ve been Elizabeth Warren all along?” act feels like an act. We all know that when the rough-and-tumble starts next year and Clinton is forced to respond off the cuff that somehow or some way she’ll put her foot in it. I’m not hoping this will happen, but we all know it will. Repeating: I don’t want her to lose but she doesn’t turn me on. And she never will.

Almost everybody loses it from time to time, and so Dennis Quaid gets a pass from me. At least he didn’t sound as nutso as Christian Bale did a few years ago. Quaid also gets points for creating a new cartoon character — “Dopey the dick.” If you’re dealing with someone who’s lost it, there are only two ways to respond. One, offer submission and obeisance in the usual physical and verbal ways (solemnly nod your head, say “you’re right, man…I hear you” and so on). And two, never say their name over and over. The guy on the video says “Dennis, Dennis”….wrong! Saying the name of a screamer implies that his anger is excessive and that his objections aren’t that important. Always address the objections. Never admonish or urge any kind of restraint. Simple agree with him and it’ll all go away in less than a minute, and the likelihood of the ranter stomping out of the room and saying “blow me!” will be next to nil. And five minutes later he’ll most likely be apologizing.

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The coolest scene in Terminator Genysis (Paramount, 7.1), I’m presuming, will be the fight between old Arnold and young Arnold…if the the CG delivers the right kind of finessed “realism.” A voice is telling me it might not be good enough, that it might look too hard-drivey. In some ways the CG in this trailer is obviously more ambitious and flamboyant than what James Cameron‘s Terminator 2: Judgment Day delivered 24 years ago, but honestly? Compared to the “never seen this before” impact of the FX in the ’91 film, this seems like more of the same stuff you’d see in any CG-driven futuristic action film.

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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