When hitchhiking was a thing back in the free-spirited ’60s and ’70s, the middle-class legend was “don’t pick up hitchhikers…they might be dangerous or worse!” This concern was 100% flipped in Quentin Masters‘ Day Tripping (’72), which basically said “don’t put your thumb out because truck drivers and other randy fellows will pull over and fuck your girlfriend, and she’ll be into it besides.”

Produced by the respectable Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler (The Gambler, Rocky, Raging Bull), Thumb Tripping, which no one has even thought about, much less seen, over the last half-century and was barely watched when it opened in ’72, was one of the less substantial, Easy Rider-ish, more fly-by-nightish indie flicks of that era.

Costarring Michael Burns (That Cold Day in the Park) and Meg Foster, pic costarred Bruce Dern (as “Smitty”), Hill Street Blues‘ Michael Conrad as a bully-ish truck driver, and Marianna Hill (the trashy wife of Fredo Corleone in The Godfather, Part II) as a frisky wife in a convertible that pulls over, etc.

“Thumb Tripping” began as a 1970 novel by Don Mitchell: “The song of the open road…blue, bitter, and mostly a bummer…Gary and Chay met on an acid trip — her last, his first. They decided to spend the summer on the road…no hurry, no special destination. The trip was in the people they made it with.”

A Kentucky resident, Burns (who’s still with us) became a respected academic and author.

The Pawlikowski and the Farhadi, I mean.

For a while it looked like a pair of fall flicks about odious software tech billionaires (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI’s Sam Altman) bringing harm to democracy and general western culture might battle each other for award-season prominence as well as box-office bucks.

But according to a recent, apparently accurate Tatiana Siegel / California Post story, the battle is over before it’s even begun.

Amazon and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the Altman flick, is throwing in the towel by opting for an early ‘27 release date and thereby surrendering to Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg drama, The Social Reckoning (Sony, 10.6).

The irony is that Artificial tells a far scarier, much more unsettling saga (i.e., the coming engulfment of everyone and everything by artificial intelligence) than The Social Reckoning, which is based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen — a chilling revelation about Zuckerberg’s willingness to undermine democracy, albeit several years ago.

Sorkin’s film is basically an urgent, presumably gripping, looking-back drama that unfolded during the Covid era while Guadagnino’s is a looking-forward, “whoa, mama”, cautionary tale that’s happening right effing now.

And yet Amazon, it seems, is candy-assing out because they believe that Joe and Jane Popcorn are too lazy-brained to grasp the ominous implications of the Altman drama.

That plus a suspicion that Joe and Jane won’t want to grapple with two dramas about billionaire big-tech bad guys during the same season. Please…too challenging!

Obviously these are two different subjects and a hell of a double bill, but Amazon doesn’t want to go up against Sony’s Sorkin saga, which Joe and Jane will presumably feel more responsive to given the link to 2010’s The Social Network, the grade-A Sorkin-scripted Zuckerberg drama that David Fincher directed.

Wilson is almost exactly the same age as Adams (both born in the early 70s), but he looks leaner, trimmer, more tuned-up.

You know what would have been really interesting? Javier Bardem as the protective husband and Wilson as the deranged Max Cady. Casting against type always adds an extra layer of energy.

Maybe, maybe not. I’d like to attend but we’ll see.

I’ve seen incomplete versions of Ken Russell‘s The Devils many times. It’s one of the most scalding portraits of religious bigotry and sadistic governmental cruelty ever created, and is quite the vicious masterwork, quite the meal.

Lo and behold, the allegedly complete, 114-minute, warts-and-all version will screen in Cannes next week.

I’ve sunk my heart and soul into this film time and again. I can recite portions of the dialogue in some scenes. I’ve seen a clip from the sex-crazed humping nuns scene, although I haven’t seen the scene in which Vanessa Redgrave’s wacko nun sexually pleasures herself with one of Oliver Reed’s burnt leg bones.

I’d naturally like to catch it in a grand final form, but the inclusion of these scenes won’t significantly change the overall. Plus Warner Bros.’s Clockwork will screen it theatrically in this country next October. Plus the Salle Bunuel is a fairly small theatre and everyone will want to get in…ooh!…ooh!…get there early!

Criterion’s 4K digital restoration of Body Heat, supervised by editor Carol Littleton and approved by director Lawrence Kasdan, pops on 5.19.26.

If they’ve tealed this thing, there will be hell to pay…that’s all I’m going to say. Body Heat is all sweaty colors…hazy sunlight, amber-lighted bars and street lights.

William Hurt‘s Ned Racine seems to be making it with an Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia version of Kathleen Turner‘s Maddy Walker…severed in half, I mean.

Hurt never so much as looks at a gun in Kasdan’s film, much less picks one up.

Unnecessary alarm: DVD Beaver Gary W. Tooze has reviewed the Criterion 4K and is not saying there’s any kind of teal problem.

Cannes Film Festival press ticket reservations have to made exactly on time or you’ll get shut out. If you’re five or ten minutes late, you’re probably fucked.

The first reservation window begins on Friday, 5.8, at 9 am (Paris time), or 3 am in New York and 12 midnight in Los Angeles. Repeating: the keyboard ordeal starts in the wee hours tomorrow night…to bed by midnight, and then wake up 2 hours and 45 minutes later and punch in what you want to see. And then crash again.

So who directed this captivating black and white video, which is only a couple of weeks old? The author-artist is Siba, a 20something based in Germany, and the track, “Dounana”, is full of righteous rage…identity, erasure, resistance. Basically an “eff Israel and eff Natanyahu” thing. Eff the Israeli missiles, eff injustice…shame on the silence. I love the growling, moaning, horror-house guitar.

In The Beloved (the original Spanish title is El Ser Querido), Javier Bardem plays a demanding, judgmental film director with a daughter who doesn’t like him much.

Bardem doesn’t, however, play a raging, sputtering beast. He plays, in fact, “nothing less and nothing more than a flawed human,” according to Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario.

“Bardem’s character, who insists on everyone else’s professionalism, has an utterly unprofessional breakdown while filming under the baking sun,” D’addario writes.

Bardem: “That takes us directly to the toxic masculinity of his generation and his age — which is my age, which is my culture, which is Spain.”

20th Century Spanish dudes who were raised under Franco, says Bardem, “were educated in a culture that was giving us all we wanted, and we took for granted that we are way more powerful and more in control — we are the driving force, as men. That is absolutely wrong in every sense.”

Wrong in every sense? If guys don’t assert themselves in the face of social bludgeoning and generally try to keep their feet in the gas, they’ll be trampled. Their rivals will open them up like a can of beans.

Interviews aside, almost nothing I see online is fully trustable…nothing. My default presumption is that almost everything I see (and I mean 85% or 90% of it) has been AI-tweaked or AI-composited to some extent. Or completely. Almost everything out there, in short, is an AI cartoon. Raw reality is very close to being a thing of the past. In this context, I almost feel a measure of affection for the Zapruder film. I certainly miss funny calamity videos like this one:

10:30 am update: Farewell to TBS, TCM and CNN pioneer Ted Turner. Dead at 87. Say what you will about Turner, there was nothing artificial about him.

You can tell right away that Matt Johnson‘s Tony (A24, August), an Anthony Bourdain biopic, will assuredly satisfy. Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) doesn’t look anything like the young Bourdain, and I don’t care because aside from Sessa’s acting chops he clearly has an X-factor thing going on. It’s also obvious that Antonio Banderas‘s performance as Ciro, a restaurant owner and chef who hires Bourdain, will be a pleasurable stand-out.

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