The total tanking of Wally Pfister‘s Transcendence ($4.8 million Friday earnings plus C+ Cinemascore rating = a likely $11.5 million dollar weekend) is the second huge flop in a row for Johnny Depp in the wake of The Lone Ranger. Depp himself didn’t flop, of course — the movie did. For the 17th or 18th time, nobody is hot to see a Johnny Depp film on the strength of his name. He’s obviously been lucky and is financially loaded beyond belief, but on his own terms he’s just another engaging middle-aged actor with offbeat tastes. He’s never been a money machine in and of himself.

Four and a half months after the 7.1.09 opening of Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies, I reminded everyone about how brilliantly it ends. I just found a new YouTube clip today and it still delivers. Excerpt: “Say what you want about Public Enemies, but the finale — the one-on-one between Marion Cotillard‘s Billie Frechette and Stephen Lang‘s Charles Winstead, a brief jailhouse conversation that ended with the words ‘Bye-bye, Blackbird’ — was the most penetrating of 2009. The best, the most memorable, the most oddly affecting.” Lang is the guy — he says every word with precisely the right tone and emphasis. If he’d delivered with just a little bit less or more, the scene wouldn’t have worked half as well.

“Anyone who’s read HE for any length of time knows I genuinely admire comedies that I call no-laugh funny — i.e., consistently clever, amusing and witty but never quite eliciting actual laughter. Nicholas Stoller‘s Neighbors (Universal, 5.9.14) is not that — it’s heh-heh funny. I was never that giddy or tickled but I never felt bored or irritated or disengaged. I got ten or twelve heh-hehs out of it, and the rest is at least fast, punchy and lewd. It’s not exactly a routine culture clash comedy but the basic set-up — a 30ish couple with a baby (Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne) vs. a party-animal college fraternity (Zac Efron, Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) that moves in next door — is familiar. But Neighbors is agreeably tight and vigorous and scattershot, and Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien‘s script (augmented, I’m sure, by nonstop improv) is a cut or two above. A likely hit.” — filed from Cinemacon in Las Vegas on 3.26.

Media people…okay, magazine editors have decided that Scarlett Johansson is extra-double-happening right now and so she’s on two big covers because…why again? Because of her tough-as-nails but not exactly earth-shattering supporting performance as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Because certain people are convinced she’ll be the absolute shit in Luc Besson‘s Lucy? Because she played a predatory, black-wigged alien picking up Scottish hitchhikers in Under The Skin, which nearly everyone agrees is a fairly rough sit? Because she played an argumentative zoo-keeper in We Bought A Zoo? Let me explain something: Scarlett Johansson has been acting in films for 20 years (her first film was Rob Reiner‘s North) and she’s delivered exactly one classic performance — as Samantha the software program in Spike Jonze‘s Her. And she was very, very good in Lost in Translation and Match Point, and she was better than-half-decent in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I’m just not getting the hey-hey-ho. Which is another way of saying I’m not experiencing the requisite libidinal stirrings.

Recent comments on Queerty, a tabloidy gay gossip website, about the Bryan Singer-Michael Egan scandal are probably somewhat indicative of under-40 gay community sentiment. So rather than listen to me, a lifelong straight guy who finds Egan’s stories about having been repeatedly and forcibly violated a bit questionable, consider the responses to today’s (4.18) Queerty story about Singer and director Roland Emmerich having thrown huge “twink” parties (along with a photo of Singer and a young blond kid). These guys obviously have a degree of insight and perspective that straights can’t have.

And before reading some of the comments (or all of them if you click on the page), consider the odd-sounding headline (odd in the sense that the implied offense and unsympathetic judgment doesn’t seem to fit a gay-friendly publication) and imagine the laughter if a scandal sheet had published a story in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s about Hugh Hefner‘s wild Playboy mansion orgies and all the pot, booze, ‘ludes and cocaine that were consumed and how Hef’s obsession for young nubile women is no secret.

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Scott Eyman‘s “John Wayne: The Life and Legend” has put me in a receptive frame of mind. This 1969 interview with Duke is from Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford (’71). I succumbed to Wayne’s charm when I first saw this way back when. 1969 was right on the girth cusp for The Duke. He allowed himself to get pretty bulky after this. (Was it Ford or Howard Hawks who complained said that Wayne had gotten too fat in his later years?) The image and sound quality are much better on the Directed by John Ford DVD, of course, that they are here. (The French guy who edited this YouTube assemblage is a talentless amateur, of course — he can’t cut worth a damn.)

In a 1.21.14 Sundance Film Festival review, I confessed to bailing on Jim Mickle‘s Cold in July and that much of my inability to stay with it was due to a hair-styling decision by Mickle and his star, Michael C. Hall. “The part I saw felt like a Jim Thompson melodrama mixed with the kind of low-rent VOD film that throws in a totally unexpected third-act plot twist because viewers won’t expect it. I’d read the reviews, I knew what was coming…later. But the main issue (and I’m not saying this just to sound eccentric or obstinate) is Mickle’s decision to have his lead actor, Michael C. Hall, wear a mullet.

“My heart sank when I saw it. A brick wall. I tried to get past it but I couldn’t. I should have just walked out when I saw the damn thing but I stupidly hung in there.

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Yesterday a Daily Mail piece about columnist Baz Bamigboye visiting the set of Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth (’15) appeared. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard portray Mr. and Mrs. M with Sean Harris, Paddy Considine, Elizabeth Debicki and David Thewlis costarring. I’ve seen my share of Macbeths (including the notoriously panned 1980 Peter O’Toole stage version at the Old Vic), and my hands-down, all-time favorite is Roman Polanski‘s 1971 film version with Jon Finch in the title role.

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If you speak ‘strine, you’d be pronouncing David Michod‘s The Rover (due to play the Cannes Film Festival’s midnight section) as “the Rohvah!” Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy, Anthony Hayes, Gillian Jones. Michod quote: “You put cars in the desert in Australia and people are going to think of Mad Max, And with all due respect to that film — and I stress that — I think The Rover is going to be way more chillingly authentic and menacing.” RPatz looks better with longer hair.

Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys (Warner Bros., 6.20) is going to be at least half-decent. It’s obviously going to play it right down the middle and maybe feel a little old-fashioned, but that’s appropriate in this context. John Lloyd Young‘s voice is dead-on but couldn’t they find a guy who actually looks like Frankie Valli? (Young looks like a thin Bruno Kirby.) The Four Seasons delivered an Italian-American New York area “doo-wop,” also known among hardcore aficionados as “wop rock.” (Perhaps the most classic manifestation being The Tokens‘ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”) Everyone thinks doo-wop peaked in the mid to late ’50s, but the Four Seasons didn’t even begin to be famous until 1962. My favorite FS tune was always “Candy Girl.”

I was put down earlier today by HE contrarians for saying I felt “a tiny bit gloomy about the just-announced selections for 2014 Cannes Film Festival” and for wondering “where’s the No Country for Old Men-level rocket fuel?” But many others have expressed similar views, to go by Justin Chang‘s Variety piece (posted at 1:58 pm) called “Cannes: Looking Past the Hype and Hate.” Excerpts: (a) “Some festgoers, surveying the actual lineup today with a mild sense of deflation, even disappointment, can too often lapse into a posture of whiny, disgruntled self-entitlement when our anticipated favorites don’t materialize when and where we want them to”; (b) “Annoyed by what we’re not getting, we sure as hell aren’t going to be excited about what we are getting; (c) “One of the more general complaints you’re likely to hear over the next few weeks about Thierry Fremaux’s latest lineup is that it’s overly safe and short on surprises: What, Mike Leigh again? Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg again? Naomi Kawase again?”; and (d) “It strikes me as…premature to be criticizing programming decisions and dismissing films sight unseen — not that it hasn’t stopped some from piling on the criticism, declaring this year’s lineup ‘pathetic‘ or ‘lame and limp-wristed,’ to name some of the choice adjectives that have been thrown around this morning on Twitter.”