Wes Anderson‘s Asteroid City (Focus Features, 6.6) is a quirky romantic dramedy set in a “fictional American desert town” during “an annual Junior Stargazer convention in 1955.” It was shot in Spain between August and October of ’21.

The visually striking one-sheet suggests it was lensed in Spain’s Almeria section, where many spaghetti westerns were filmed in the ’60s. If it was shot domestically one might presume that the Monument Valley region was used.

But no — it was mostly shot in the town of Chinchón, which is roughly 50 km outside of Madrid. In the mid ’50s a big bullfight scene was shot in Chinchon for Around the World in Eighty Days.

Pic costars the usual assortment of eccentric Anderson players plus a newbie or two (Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jeff Goldblum, Fisher Stevens, Rita Wilson, et. al.).

Asteroid City will debut six weeks hence at the Cannes Film Festival.

No Uvalde-styled chickenshit pussyfooting around for those Nashville cops…they charged right in there and dropped Audrey Hale, a transgender graphic designer who lived with his/her/their parents, like a bad habit.

It took me a couple of attempts to get through John Scheinfeld‘s What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?, but I finally did. My basic impression is that it’s an odd tale — a curio — about a strange detour that BS&T, a hugely popular jazz-rock fusion group, took in ’70 when they went on a State Department tour of three Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe (one being Romania). The tour was frowned upon by rock culture cognoscenti, and seemed to underline a general impression that BS&T was an MOR group favored by squares.

They also played a big gig at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which was even more unhip than performing to Eastern Europe. And they appeared on The Andy Williams Show…Jesus. And then came that hokey track from their third album, “Lucretia McEvil“…later.

There’s nothing “wrong” with being MOR or appealing to people with vaguely schmaltzy taste in music and…you know, it takes all sorts to make a world and all that.

And I’m not saying that Scheinfeld hasn’t assembled a reasonably absorbing, pro-level film with flavor and feeling — he has. But unlike my all-time favorite Scheinfeld doc, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?, it doesn’t have a lot of emotional resonance. You come out of it and it’s like “okay, not bad…diverting as far as it went.”

But then I read Owen Gleiberman’s 3.27 Variety review, and a paragraph about David Clayton-Thomas, BST’s lead singer from mid’68 onward (not counting an attempted solo-career detour)…this paragraph just hit the spot, man. I don’t mean to sound flip or cruel, but it almost gave me more pleasure than Scheinfeld’s doc, to be perfectly honest….not that there’s anything especially lacking or derelict about the film. It just didn’t get me high.

“The rock-‘n’-roll-ecstasy-meets-relax-the-’70s-are-here duality of Blood, Sweat & Tears was incarnated by the contradictory charisma of David Clayton-Thomas,” Gleiberman writes. “He favored skin-tight shirts with tie-dye stripes and leather pants, but he was no hippie. With his longish receding hair and sultry eyebrows and trucker’s build, he was like Joe Don Baker reborn as Elvis’s surly, sleazy bruiser brother, and he sang in an insinuating Mack-truck blues growl, like a wilder Tom Jones with a hint of Jim Jones. He was mesmerizing.”

We all know what it means to be a “surly, sleazy bruiser type” — it means that underneath the facade you’re a sniffing, panting, four-legged dog on the prowl for poontang. It means that you’re into compulsive muff-diving and getting blown in hotel rooms at 3 am and whatnot. A guy who summons notions of being the ornery bad brother of Elvis suggests a gauche, hormonally-unbridled truck driver with low-rent appetites.

Does anyone remember that photo of Jim Jones‘ corpse after he shot himself, sprawled on the ground of that big tent with that big pot belly poking out? Charismatic cult leaders always had the pick of the litter, or so the cliche goes, and we’ve all read stories about Jones being a brooding sexual conquistador and all that, and then you throw in an early ’70s image of Joe Don Baker, still best known for playing the baseball-bat wielding Buford Pusser…throw it all together and it seems as if the doc should have focused on DCT rather than BS&T…whaddaya think?

I’m not saying that Gleiberman’s description reflects who DCT actually is, mind. In recent interviews the 81 year-old seems like a mellow, moderate, likable guy. I am saying, however, that good writing flips a switch.

It’s obviously tragic when a person has slipped into such a dark and seemingly irredeemable place that he/she feels that suicide is the only option. Alas, that’s an old-hat approach. The 21st Century has introduced a new concept — “I’ll be taking several innocent people with me as I leave this mortal coil” — that turns tragedy into something evil.

Friendo:

A significant wrinkle has been added to the Nashville school shooter situation. The wrinkle is that the 28 year old shooter, Audrey Hale, was a biological female identifying as a transgender male. Aiden Hale was the transgender name.

Pull the trigger already…Jesus. Update: Wednesday at the earliest.

For many years Ann Hornaday and I shared a beautiful, third-floor, Napoleonic-era duplex in the old part of Cannes (7 rue Jean Mero). Seven weeks hence I’ll be crashing in a new place that’s way the hell over on the other side of town — 15 Rue Jean Cresp, 06400 Cannes, France. Less convenient because it’s a 25-minute walk to the Palais, but there’s some kind of bus service and rent-a-bikes so let’s see what happens.

Seven are dead from a mass shooting at the Covenant School, an elementary school on the outskirts of Nashville. The cops are saying that the shooter was a female in her teens, armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun. Three students and three faculty members are dead along with the shooter. When the officers got to the second level of the school, they saw a female shooter, apparently in her teens, and they drilled her right quick.

98% of mass shooters have been men, according to The Violence Project.