This Lacoste ad, directed by Seb Edwards, was first aired during the Sochi Winter Olympics. Exposing your emotional underbelly can result in feelings of fear and trepidation, but if you’re wearing a Lacoste polo shirt things might work out. Take a chance, right? You’ll notice that as Mr. Beardo leans over for a kiss, the woman’s expression and body language don’t indicate receptivity, much less enthusiasm. She just sits there with a vaguely quizzical expression as she waits for him to lean over far enough, and then she faintly responds. The levitating-above-the-coffee-table action is presumably happening in the guy’s head. So basically the guy is taking the risk (because he bought a Lacoste shirt earlier that day?) and the gal isn’t risking shit. This couple probably goes through the same routine every day. You might say “some relationships are like this” but almost all of them are. The one who loves more is always wondering where things are, and the one who loves less is always a bit less engaged and tends to skirt eye contact and is often checking texts.

Tunnel Bear is for Europeans who want to watch digital streaming that’s only accessible to U.S. viewers. It somehow tunnels under the coding restrictions. A director pal I’ve corresponded with (and whom I met in Paris last year) suggested it. $4.99 per month to watch HBO Go and Netflix — seemed like a good deal. So I downloaded and installed and paid the money and did everything right, and it didn’t work. I went “hmmmm” and installed a recent software update, and then re-started, re-jiggered, double-checked…nothing. Update: The trick or the point of Tunnel Bear is to LIE. It enables you to LIE convincingly about where you’re trying to watch streaming from. It is a FIB-ENABLING software — that’s the whole point. Rocket scientist that I am, I thought I was obliged to NOT LIE and say I was actually in France. I finally changed the location setting to United States and it worked.

In my 5.22 review of Xavier Dolan‘s Mommy, I said that from my front-row vantage point the 1:1 aspect ratio (confirmed by Dolan at his press conference) “seemed like it was closer to 1 to 1.2 or 1 to 1.3 — taller than it was wide.” It’s a curious illusion but it still looks this way here. And yet if you tilt your head sideways it’s a perfectly square box. It goes without saying that the popcorn-munchers are going to have a very slight problem with this, like they’re being deprived on some level. Many/most of us been conditioned to accept 1.37 as the official non-wide a.r. but the taller-than-wider illusion might (I say “might”) get in the way for some. Or strike them as visually precious.

The first Annie trailer popped on March 5th or thereabouts. Now we have a newbie, which is smartly cut and rhythmic and so on, but which basically delivers the same spunk and pizazz. We’ll probably see version #3 sometime around Labor Day, and then version #4 in early November. And then it opens on 12.19. So eight more months of this and then the Oscar campaign, which HE, of course, will be delighted to banner. It still looks like spirited wealth porn, which there’s an audience for above and beyond the fans of the stage musical and the 1982 John Huston-directed screen version. As I said before, if the new Annie turns out to be half-decent Quvenzhane Wallis…well, let’s see what happens.

Ari Folman‘s The Congress debuted at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes a year ago and got all kinds of nice attention and good reviews. Then it more or less vanished. Now it’s being trailered for commercial release on 8.29 via Drafthouse Films and Films We Like, but it feels like old news at this point. Robin Wright, more or less playing herself, agrees to be digitally replicated for use in various media but, of course, there are complications. Costarring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Danny Huston, Harvey Keitel and Paul Giamatti. The title is awful, a non-starter.

Quentin Tarantino in Cannes a few days ago: “As far as I’m concerned, digital projection and DCPs is the death of cinema as I know it. It’s not even about shooting your film on film or shooting your film on digital. The fact that most films now are not presented in 35 millimeter means that the war is lost. And digital projections, that’s just television in public. And apparently the whole world is okay with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead.” HE response: Except for an apparently still-unsolved problem with inky blacks, digital projection is heaven for me. Movies these days don’t just look better on big screens — they look and sound extraordinary. QT is just sentimentally or romantically attached to the organic 35mm experience of the ’70s, which Grindhouse was a huge tribute to. He can have it. Too many green scratches and sound pops, not to mention those occasional faulty reel changes. I used to be a projectionist so don’t tell me. Eight at the gate.

In Ryan Murphy and Larry Kramer‘s The Normal Heart (HBO, now airing), a wrenching drama about the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, Mark Ruffalo‘s Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, angrily pushes an initially resistant gay community and the political establishment to face up to the epidemic and stop hiding their heads in the sand. In the view of N.Y. Times critic Neil Genzlinger, Ruffalo/Weeks “is incredibly irritating (as he’s supposed to be)…all annoyance, all the time; no empathy for him allowed, even though, at this point, we know he is on the right side of history.”

There’s a passage in Tom O’Neil and Michael Musto‘s just-posted Gold Derby discussion of the upcoming June 8th Tony Awards that caught my attention. Musto predicts that Byran Cranston will win Best Actor for his ball-of-fire portrayal of Lyndon Johnson in All The Way (which I saw earlier this month), but his caveat about Cranston not really playing the “laconic” Johnson Musto remembers is beside the point. (Here’s the mp3.) He’s correct in observing that in public appearances Johnson was no firecracker and did, as Musto notes, sound a little bit “like Huckleberry Hound.” But even though he doesn’t attempt to mimic Johnson’s laid-back South Texas drawl, Cranston is playing the real, behind-the-scenes, wheeler-dealing LBJ — the man behind the curtain.

In a 5.25 article about Medium, a site/app for telling and reading stories, N.Y. Times “Media Equation” columnist and ex-Bagger David Carr has ignited a mini-Twitter shitstorm by calling the Evan Williams-led operation behind Medium a “platisher,” which Sulia CEO Jonathan Glick defined last February as “both a platform and a publisher.” The Twitter reaction to Carr’s mention of the term was instantaneous. No way, get outta here, shove it, etc. Why the hostility? I can only explain my resistance. A new term works or not depending on the sound of it. If it sounds fleet and cool, it’s in. If it sounds twerpy or dorky, forget it. Nonsensical as this may sound, platisher sounds to me like a mixture of platypus and phisher. Nuff said. Into the wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings…”Odin!!!”

It always bothers me when old-time Hollywood guys use the word “called” in a certain context. Older actresses and foreign-born filmmakers never do this — it’s only and always the former big-shot males of age 70 or older. Guys whose careers have slowed down a bit and who are looking to gently remind the listener that they were once flush with success. It happens when they mention a famous film, play or TV show that they had something significant to do with. Instead of saying “and then we put our heads together and made Coming Home,” they’ll say “and then we put our heads together and made a film called Coming Home.” “Called” is code for “the film/play/TV show had a huge impact and our lives were greatly enhanced as a result, even to this day.” Nothing criminal in a little boasting — it’s just irksome. It’s classier to avoid the embellishment. Listen to Martin Scorsese when he talks about the old days. He’ll never say “and then we made a film called Mean Streets” — he’ll just say “and then we made Mean Streets.” No biggie.

“Bad behavior online is so common that it has generated its own typology of abuse. ‘Flaming’ is to engage in a deeply personal and angry war of words across an online discussion. ‘Griefing’ is repeatedly to torment someone, mostly through abuse in an online forum. A ‘troll’ is someone who intentionally disrupts online communities, most often under a pseudonym, and the activity of ‘trolling’ is so widespread that the online Urban Dictionary lists dozens of rival definitions — ‘being a prick on the internet because you can is the most succinct.” — from a 5.23 Financial Times piece by John Sunyer. I’ve been flamed a few times and even griefed once or twice, and Lord knows HE has seen its share of pricks and trolls. But things haven’t been too bad around here lately, which is nice. Truly malignant commenters have been relatively few and far between. I’ll zotz someone every so often but that’s par for the course.