I’m totally down with the idea of Starbucks exec chairman Howard Schultz, an actual billionaire, running for president against fake billionaire Donald Trump in 2020. Yesterday Schultz resigned as exec chairman, effective 6.26, with his eye on new challenges. He’s obviously pondering a White House run. Schultz has the Starbucks brand recognition. He’s obviously innovative, practical minded and not insane, and he could pull away from the pack. And the rural dumbshits would’t feel threatened because he’s white, albeit half-Jewish.

Nobody really believes that Bernie Sanders can beat Trump. Everyone likes Joe Biden but he has a certain yesterday’s-news aura (not to mention that horrible neck wattle). And Oprah Winfrey has made it clear that she lacks the character and cojones to run. Somebody has to step up and start making noise about replacing Trump. If not Schultz, who?

I don’t “do” birthdays as a rule, but thanks for all the good wishes. Ever since I developed an acute sense of encroaching mortality (or sometime in my mid 30s), birthdays have been an official signifier that I am one year closer to the final curtain and the eternal black nothingness of death. I would much rather focus on the thousands upon thousands of profound delights, lessons and comforts afforded by being vigorously alive. Tatyana suggested yesterday that I should instead regard birthdays as a celebration of the sum total of my life and the fact that I’ve made it this far in good health and without any maladies, aches, neck wattles or bald spots to speak of. So okay, fine — I’m happy about that part of it.

Snapped during last night’s AFI Fest Call Me By Your Name after-party at the Hollywood Roosevelt.

People have been staring at me for years (in cafes, at parties, on subways) because they were sure that I was Chris Walken. There’s a resemblance, okay, but my hair is darker and a bit longer, I look younger than C.W. (no facial saddblebag creases or neck wattle to speak of, due in part to my Prague touch-ups), and — hello? — I don’t have his signature voice. At all. Last May a guy in a Rome leather shop came up to me and insisted with a knowing smile that he knew I was Walken, despite my denials. “You’ve seen him in movies, right?” I said to the guy. “So you know his voice. People have been imitating him for years, right? Do I sound like him?” The guy wouldn’t back off, continuing with the grin and the “heh-heh” and saying “okay, Chris, but I know it’s you.”

Everyone knows the set-up for Our Souls At Night, right? A pair of widowed 70somethings in a small town — Jane Fonda‘s Addie Moore and Robert Redford‘s Louis Walters — decide to forego loneliness and solitude by sleeping together. Not sexually but as a simple act of comfort and companionship.

Things are a bit awkward at first but not for long. They talk a bit and then a bit more, and they get to know each other, and they gradually come to everything good that you might expect to happen between two good people.

What happens doesn’t actually amount to a whole lot, but it seems like enough. The film isn’t about hanging with Louis and Addie as much as Bob and Jane, whom some of us have come to know pretty well over the decades. Louis and Addie are less wealthy and more conservative-minded than Bob and Jane, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of difference. Bob and Jane are good company for each other and for us.

What we get from their relationship are little comfort pills or, if you will, little spoonfuls of honey and squeezings of lemon in our tea. They speak quietly and gently to each other, never sharply or critically or sarcastically. Familiarity, trust…nobody’s in any hurry.

Our Souls At Night experiences a couple of mild downturns, mostly by way of Louis and Addie’s resentful grown children. Louis was a less-than-perfect father to his daughter (Judy Greer), and she reminds him of that for what I presume is the 179th time. Addie’s brief lack of vigilance led to a tragedy with her daughter, and so her alcoholic, occasionally abrasive son (Matthias Schoenaerts) reminds her of that also. Bluntly, hurtfully.

Schoenaerts’ character nearly destroys Louis and Addie’s relationship, and the film with it. He’s such an astonishing alcoholic asshole, and Addie, God help her, agrees with his view that she was the cause of her daughter’s death, and so Schoenharts, furious at Addie for her horrible non-error, pressures her into separating from Louis to make up for her mistake. What bullshit! Life is shorter than short, for God’s sake. If you’ve found a good thing, never let it go.

I wanted Addie to tell Schoenharts to go fuck himself, but she feels too guilt-ridden to do anything but indulge him. I wanted Schoenharts to bless his young son Jamie (Iain Armitage) by dying in a drunken car crash or slitting his wrists in the bathtub, but alas, no. Poor Jamie is living with an abuser, and is doomed to a life of anger and resentment and Al Anon meetings.

A movie that makes you wish for the absence or the death of a bad guy and then refuses to get rid of him is not, in my book, doing the right thing.

In a 4.18 post titled “Last Days of Classic HE,” I mentioned a bothersome aspect of the redesign. The smartphone edition (different than the laptop version) will, I said, “be narrower than the wide-angle laptop version, which will result in some elements (like my headshot) being sliced off.” Yesterday (4.19) Toronto Star critic Peter Howell urged that I keep my mug on the smartphone version. “The vast majority of clicks these days come via smartphone, not laptops,” he reminded. “Hollywood Elsewhere is very much associated with your personality, and I think it would be a mistake to have your face clipped from the masthead for the mobile version.” I forwarded this to the tireless Sasha Stone, who’s handling the re-design. Late last night she sent along her solution — perfect!

Also: The redesign will definitely include a “Classic HE” sidebar (pear cake, “Loud Latinos“, cowboy hat, Oxford wifigate, Hispanic party elephant, HE vs. Jezebel, Paris, Hanoi/Vietnam, “What I’ve Learned“, neck wattle surgery, “Tale of Two Flophouses“, Schumergate, shrieking hyena laughter, etc.) along with a movie reviews sidebar.

If I’ve said this once I’ve said it 100 times. If you’re a 60-plus actor you need to lose the droopy neck wattle. It’s about as complex as having your teeth cleaned, and if your surgeon isn’t a complete idiot it won’t look like anything. You can still look weathered and grizzled and all that other other sexy saddlebag stuff. You can even keep a slight neck wattle, but droopies are impossible. And Sam Elliott knows this. Joe Biden‘s neck wattle has been driving me crazy, and he refuses to do the thing. It’s like walking around with your fly open.

From a 1.21.17 Hollywood Reporter review, written by John Frosch: “In The Hero, unlike in most of his other projects, Elliott appears in nearly every frame as Lee Hayden, an over-the-hill Western film star whose cancer diagnosis prompts him to plan a comeback, reconnect with his estranged daughter and romance a younger woman. If that story sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before, with tweaks and variations, in movies like The Verdict, Tender Mercies, The Wrestler, Crazy Heart and many more.

As a prospective Democratic vp candidate Tom Vilsack, the current Secretary of Agriculture and Iowa governor from ’99 through ’07, is an even more depressing prospect that Virginia Senator Tim “basketball-head” Kaine, whom Hillary also likes.  Hillary needs a running mate with charisma, eloquence and pizazz — qualities she lacks.  There’s something odiously settled and sedate about the guy. He’s in no way an X-factor type. That jowly, heavyish face (he has a semi-inflated-balloon neck wattle) makes him look like a Pavillions manager or a cattle owner or an airline pilot or some guy who lives down the street and mows his lawn every weekend. He looks like a family man who eats meat loaf, mashed potatoes and string beans every other night. Vilsack seems like a decent fellow, but the dullness! I don’t want this platitudinous meathead taking over if Hillary should meet with tragedy. I want my girl Elizabeth Warren. This is awful…awful.

Was it really so awful, so devastating, so crippling to the cause that Bernie Sanders waited five weeks to endorse Hillary Clinton? If Sanders had capitulated right after the California primary, his supporters would have seen that as a shameful betrayal. Bernie “hung on”, quixotically, because he and his team wanted progressive Democratic platform concessions that probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d conceded in early June. You know the Clintons.

Does anyone except Sasha Stone seriously believe that Donald Trump might prevail in November? Hillary is naturally and unstoppably self-destructive, agreed, but there are no more threats hanging over her now. No more emails, no more Benghazis…nothing except the unfortunate fact that millions and millions of people don’t like her much.

“Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that,” Sanders said this morning. “She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States.

“I have come here today not to talk about the past but to focus on the future. That future will be shaped more by what happens on November 8th in voting booths across our nation than by any other event in the world. I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president. Mainly because Donald Trump must not win. Please. Get real. Oh, right…the yokels out there have a different idea of what that means.

“Am I concerned that Secretary Clinton isn’t Elizabeth Warren? That she’s not really on the Sanders-Warren revolution team? That she’s more of a practical minded center-right Atlanticist than a real lefty? Am I concerned that Susan Sarandon is contemplating driving off the Grand Canyon as we speak? Does the fact that Hillary has been nurturing all of those cozy, amicable relationships with Wall Street billionaires give me a moment of pause? Of course it does. Of course I am.

Ronald Reagan was a few days shy of 70 when he was first sworn in as President on 1.20.81, and was just a few days away from turning 78 when his second term ended on 1.20.89. Hillary Clinton will be 69 and 1/4 when she takes office next January, and will be 77 when she wraps her second term, if and when. I’m not predicting or presuming anything, but I wonder how invested she’ll be in being re-elected in 2020 or (I’m just speculating) she might be of a mind to pass the torch and get a little r & r with her grandkids while she has the time and the health. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t back off at all if he got elected. He’ll work the treadmill, lift weights, eat right and charge on until his late 90s. Bernie will bop until he drops. But Hillary…who knows? And what about Gavin Newsom? Because after Hillary’s two terms, the electorate will definitely be in a mood for someone without a cackly laugh or a neck wattle. And you know what else? By the time Hillary leaves office in 2025 it’ll be time for a Millenial presidential candidate or two. I define Millenials as those born in the mid ’80s and beyond, so right now the oldest Millenials are about 30 and by ’23 or ’24 they’ll be in their late 30s and/or pushing 40, or three or four years older than they legally need to be to run for President (i.e., 35).

“Repressed sexuality is a major undercurrent in John Frankenheimer‘s Seconds (’66), signaling the sexual revolution movement among middle-class Americans in the 1960s. And so it’s easy to see why Rock Hudson, whose double life was a constant throughout his career despite its widespread knowledge throughout the industry, was drawn to a picture about the manipulation of appearances and the denial of one’s inner self.

“Before John Randolph opts into the program, there’s a bedroom scene where his wife makes her way onto her husband’s separate bed. She offers herself up to him, but he remains cold and unwilling, the moment as unsexy a depiction of middle-aged sexuality as ever to appear in cinema.

“Later, after his transformation into Wilson, Hamilton attends the bacchanalia festival with Nora (Salome Jens) and finds himself uncomfortable in his surroundings. Free spirits disrobe to their nethers and gaily dance about, the frantic cutting of the sequence reflecting Hamilton’s discomfort with his own desire to join them. He stands on the margins, watching, enticed and ashamed for it, until Nora strips and leaps into a grape crushing vat along with countless nude others.

“Finally the crowd gathers him and, though he protests, forces off his clothes; he’s plunged into the vat and covered in grape must. Clinging to Nora, he at last lets go and begins to shout with ecstasy and joy. Hamilton’s sexual repression seems cured, a hopeful idea for Hudson, whose secret could not be so easily or publically freed from its constraints at the time.” — from Brian Eggart’s Deep Focus review, posted on 8.18.12.

Andrew Haigh‘s 45 Years was a hit with all the critics at the Berlin Film Festival. The wonderful Charlotte Rampling won the festival’s Best Actress award as the wife of Tom Courtenay, whose character has been curiously in love with a woman who’s been missing for half a century, or since 1965 (which is when Courtney played “Strelnikov” in Dr. Zhivago). Pic is about what happens when a letter notifies Courtney that the dead body of his long-lost love has been found. Wells to Haigh, Courtenay and Rampling: Do you really expect an audience to care about this situation? If you’re in love with someone who isn’t your wife but you haven’t seen this other woman, much less fucked her, in 50 years does that even qualify as infidelity? Who cares? Sidenote: Courtenay has been aging terribly for a long time, but now he looks like a mummy. I realize that he’s 78, but he really should “do” something about the neck wattle and accept the fact that the two-week beardo thing is profoundly unattractive when you’re old.

I attended last night’s Brian Wilson concert at L.A.’s Greek theatre, courtesy of the Love & Mercy team at Roadside. I went with mixed expectations. One, I’d seen Wilson and his backup band give a pleasant but not-exactly-knockout show at a UCLA venue about nine or ten years ago, and who knew if this show would be as good? It might be worse. And two, I’d been told by a friend that a typical Wilson audience these days is wall-to-wall oldsters — baldies, pot bellies, white hair, neck wattles, tent-like Hawaiian shirts — and the thought of being part of such a throng depressed me to no end. I loved the drive up to the Greek (the weather was warm and dry and the various fragrances in the air were to die for) but as I approached the main entrance I was asking myself, “Do I really want to be here?”

Well, my fears were unfounded. The crowd was definitely younger than expected (a healthy blend of people of all ages) and the show was far and away the best Beach Boys/Brian Wilson concert I’ve ever been lucky enough to savor. Paul Merten‘s tight ten-piece band (eleven counting Wilson) just knocked the shit out of 32 Wilson songs, and I’m sorry but it felt truly joyful start to finish. Nobody was cutting the band any slack — they were delivering like champs, gloriously smooth and clean and confident.

About three or four songs into the show I turned to Madelyn Hammond (there with Pete) on my right and said, “Wow, the band is really good!” She agreed 100%. Two seconds later a bewigged Paul Giamatti leaned over and said to me, “What? What did you say to Madelyn?” I looked at him and said, “It’s none of your fucking business!” I’m kidding — Giamatti wasn’t there.