Hats off to whomever designed this poster. Cool and classy, excellent poise and balance, a suggestion of tragedy. Kristen Stewart doesn’t wear a black outfit of any kind in the film, but that’s okay. The poster is the poster and the film is the film, and Spencer doesn’t live up to what the poster conveys or promises.

What are some other instances in which a poster was much more exciting and engaging than the film it was selling?

“I’ve never understood why Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. I will bravely defend this gem a week from Sunday (Nov. 21) at the Los Feliz American Cinematheque. Humor and satire so fast and brash that it makes His Girl Friday feel like The Tree of the Wooden Clogs!. Come on down!” — Daniel Waters on Facebook.

I’ll tell you why it doesn’t get half the love that Some Like It Hot does. Because some of it is dated, some of it isn’t funny, and one or two scenes are dreadful. (Don’t ask.) But Act Three, which is all about James Cagney‘s C.R. MacNamara, a ruthless Cola Cola executive, changing Horst Buccholz‘s Otto Ludwig Piffle, a scruffy, revolutionary Communist, into a monacle-wearing dandy in a three-piece suit within two or three hours, is dead perfect. Especially….

Cagney to Buccholz: “Is that all the gratitude I get for getting you out of jail?”
Buccholz to Cagney: “You got me into jail!”
Cagney to Buccholz: “So we’re even.”

I would love to watch this 1961 classic with an enthusiastic crowd, but I’m worried about the AC’s intention to show a 35mm print. I have the Bluray, and it looks absolutely exquisite. Why don’t they just show a digital version? Film is over-rated.

A couple of weeks ago I saw Robert Weide‘s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IFC Films, 11.19), a decades-in-the-making portrait of the late beloved novelist, whose novels Weide fell for a long time ago. And then he met Vonnegut and bonded with him, and began filming the doc back in the early ’80s (or something like that), and now, 40 years hence, it’s finally done.

I’m a Vonnegut fan and therefore partial, but Weide’s film is an intimate and devotional portrait of a fascinating, very special Great Depression and WWII-generation writer…a guy who became an inspirational cult figure for God-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands of youths in the late ’60s and ’70s and beyond the infinite and all the way to Tralfamadore.

I’ve almost always been “somewhere else”, all my life. Hence the name of this column.

At any given moment I’m back in Paris or Prague or Hanoi, or in junior or senior high school or suffering through my tweener years, or tapping out a piece on my IBM Selectric in either my West 4th Street or Bank Street apartment, or hitting the Mudd Club in the early ’80s, or getting bombed or doing drugs with my friends in the early to mid ’70s or listening to David Bowie‘s “Beauty and the Beast” on a friend’s bedroom stereo in the late ’70s. Or traipsing around a wintry Park City during the hey-hey Sundance years (’95 to ’15).

Occasionally I’ll pay attention to people I’m talking to or events I happen to be witnessing or places I happen to be, but most of the time I’m Billy Pilgrim.

When I think of the 40-ish Dean Stockwell, I think of his flitty weirdo-pervo characters. Like the mascara-wearing creepo-pervo he played in David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (’86), and the mobster he played in Jonathan Demme‘s Married to the Mob (’88), for which he landed a Best Supporting Actor nom.

But the strongest currents in Stockwell’s career were stirred by his boyhood and young-man roles, specifically the son-of-Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement (’47) and the lead in Joseph Losey‘s The Boy With The Green Hair (’48), and then, as he got into his mid ’20s, Richard Fleischer‘s Compulsion (’59), Jack Cardiff‘s Sons and Lovers (’60) and Sidney Lumet‘s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (’62).

I’m sorry but Quantum Leap doesn’t even come to mind.

One thing I didn’t know is that Stockwell designed the legendary jacket cover photo of Neil Young‘s “American Stars ‘n Bars” (1976).

Stockwell died two days ago in New Mexico. He was 85. I’m very sorry but then again he led a full life…fuller than most.

…that no one and I mean no one will have the nerve to ask during this evening’s post-screening q & a.

Thanks There’s no disputing that Beanie Feldstein‘s performance as Monica Lewinsky (particularly that look of shock and intimidation and primal fear) is fully present, and obviously skillful and affecting.

But for a miniseries in which the makeup department used every trick in the book to make the actors look as much as possible like the character they were playing (especially in the matter of Sarah Paulson‘s Linda Tripp), they were given a hopeless task when it came to Beanie. I’ve seen all seven episodes thus far, and her lack of resemblance has thrown me each and every time. Why then?

The apparent idea was to emphasize Beanie/Monica’s victim status…the huge gulf between mousey little Beanie and Clive Owen‘s silky Bill Clinton…doubling-down on Clinton’s opportunism and sexual exploitation. But if a gifted actor with at least a slight physical resemblance to Lewinsky had been cast, the miniseries would have been that much better.

So in the forthcoming Midnight Run remake/sequel, which will presumably blow chunks because lightning generally refuses to strike twice in the same place, Regina Hall will presumably play the lead or female equivalent of Robert De Niro‘s “Jack Walsh” character. No word on who will play Charles Grodin‘s mob-accountant role.

De Niro and Jane Rosenthal will “produce” (i.e., pocket a paycheck) for Tribeca. Jesse Collins is also collecting a check via Jesse Collins Entertainment. Hall will also collect a producer’s fee under her RH Negative label. Universal’s Sara Scott (no fee, just salary) will oversee on behalf of the studio.

I didn’t mean to say “Midnight Run with Black Chicks.” I meant to say “Midnight Run with a female bounty hunter of color plus an actress of color doing her best at resuscitating the late Charles Grodin.”