Variety has promoted Angelique Jackson to Senior Entertainment Writer…congrats on a new title and a larger salary. Jackson will continue to write about the film and media business, etc.

A day after the Soderbergh Oscars ended, Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister asked Jackson if the Academy “got it wrong” by handing the Best Actor trophy to The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins. Jackson answered “absolutely,” and then said: “We were all hoping for something that was gonna shake things up, but I don’t think that [the Hopkins win] was in any way what the Oscar producers intended. There was a lot of hope that we were going to end with this very emotional, heartfelt moment…all these things were pointing toward a great, great emotional catharsis. Instead we had this real kind of catastrophic surprise.”

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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court court has vacated the sexual assault conviction against Bill Cosby on some kind of gobbbledygook technicality, and so the legendary “While You Were Sleeping” scumbag-to-end-all-scumbags, accused by more than 60 women of either sexual assault, rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, will soon be a free man.

The state Supreme Court rationale says that “a previous prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, opened the door for him to speak freely in a civil lawsuit against him, and that testimony was key in the comic’s conviction in criminal court.” Repeating: Cosby was persuaded by said prosecutor’s decision not to charge him in a civil lawsuit…that decision led Cosby to speak candidly about this or that aspect of the civil assault charges against him, and this or that candid admission led to a subsequent criminal court conviction,” blah blah.

In short, Cosby convicted himself by blurting out this and that, and it was a certain prosecutor’s fault that he did that.

This is straight out of The Postman Always Rings Twice….calling Hume Cronyn!

Cosby, 83, was found guilty in September 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. He’s been held all this time in a state prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The address is 1200 Mokychic Rd, Collegeville, PA 19426.

HE to Tarantino: Groundhog Day wasn’t “a Bill Murray movie.” It was a movie about numbing repetition leading, ironically, to illumination…about spiritual life cycles and Buddhist notions of spiritual gain and advancement…about the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — by way of Kübler-Ross. It’s basically a life-is-hard-but-it-gradually-gets-better movie…a metaphor about spirit and light and seeing through the crap…about “even in a day as long as this, even in a lifetime of endless repetition, there’s still room for possibilities.”

So Murray’s weatherman character, Phil Connors, gradually turning into a more spiritually advanced fellow than he was at the film’s beginning…that wasn’t a cop-out, that was the idea.

Yet another metaphorical female rage film…deadpan humor, platinum blonde hair, nobody gives a shit, “howz that goin’ for you?” Apparently playing upon Kate Beckinsale‘s real-life rep as a man-eater…well, a young-man eater. Directed by Tanya Wexler, the niece of Haskell Wexler.

I’ll wager that 99% of those who consider themselves serious moviegoers have never seen a film before noon, much less in the early morning. I’m also presuming that at least 85% to 90% of theatrical viewings happen in the early to mid evening, with the remainder covered by daytime showings for seniors and midnight shows for cultists.

I’m telling you straight and true that you haven’t lived until you’ve caught a theatrical screening at breakfast hour or before.

I’ve seen at least a hundred films at 8:30 am over the last 25 years, and almost all of them at the Cannes Film Festival. Press screenings simply begin at that hour.

I’ve been writing for years about the special current or communion that kicks in when you catch a film in the early morning, especially when the film turns out to be extra good and double especially when you’ve consumed a large cappuccino just before it starts.

There’s something high-voltage about catching a breakfast-hour screening. You somehow feel more attuned and observant, and your aesthetic pores are more wide open than later in the day or that evening.

Anyone who’s caught a midnight film after waking 16 or 17 hours earlier knows what that’s like. Your system struggles to focus upon the film as much as possible and it feels fine initially, but after a 45 minutes or an hour you can feel yourself fading. You might stay awake but your concentration is less than it could or should be.

During the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Jordan Ruimy and I caught Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse at 8:30 am, but circumstances were such that we had to be at the theatre (the two-story facility below the J.W. Marriott theatre) at 7:30 am, which meant arising an hour earlier. One Red Bull + two strong coffees = throttle up!

I’ve mentioned before that my first viewing of George Lucas‘s THX-1138 happened around 4 or 4:30 am. It was being shown as part of a 24-hour FILMEX sci-fi marathon, which happened (as I recall) in the spring of ’74 or ’75. I remember getting up at 3 or 3:15 am and driving over to the Century City Plitt theatres in the dark.

If an 8:30 am screening feels highly charged, it’s even more pulverizing to catch a film at 4:30 am. Your system hasn’t even begun to think about waking up, and all you’ve got going is that first jolt of caffeine.

Somehow or some way, every film fanatic needs to catch a film at dawn. Just to do it, just to feel it.

I’ve been trying to find the name of the gravel-voiced, gray-haired actor playing the FBI guy in this jailhouse conference scene with Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese). Or the episode in which this conversation happens. No luck so far.

“Junior” and Chianese were born close together — Chianese in 1931, “Junior” in ’29 or thereabouts. Corey Stoll, 45, will play the 40ish Junior in The Many Saints of Newark. Chianese’s best known role before he lucked into his long-running Sopranos role was “Johnny Ola”in The Godfather, Part II, whom Chianese portrayed when he was 42.

It’s time to rectify the 1959 Oscars once and for all. Better late than never. The winners of record will still retain their places in history, of course, but 61 years have passed, new perspectives have emerged, and it’s time to ratify the new deal. But without being too rigid-minded.

Charlton Heston gave a first-rate performance in Ben-Hur, and rode that film’s political coattails to win a Best Actor Oscar. But who watches that 1959 Biblical epic today to savor Heston’s emoting? The film is admired, justly, for the sea battle and chariot race sequences, for Robert Surtees‘ cinematography, and for the huge expensive sets. But HE has another Best Actor winner in mind.

Starting from the top…

BEST MOTION PICTURE: Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest. 1st Runner Up: Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot. 2nd Runner Up: John Ford‘s The Horse Soldiers. 3rd Runner Up: Lewis Milestone‘s Pork Chop Hill. 4th Runner Up: Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder.

BEST DIRECTOR (ditto): Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest.

BEST ACTOR: Tie between Cary Grant, North by Northwest, and Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot. Other nominees: James Stewart, Anatomy of a Murder; Gregory Peck, Pork Chop Hill; Laurence Harvey, Room at the Top.

BEST ACTRESS: Marilyn Monroe, Some Like It Hot. Runners-Up: Simone Signoret, Room at the Top; Anna Magnani, The Fugitive Kind; Audrey Hepburn, The Nun’s Story; Claire Bloom, Look Back in Anger.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Tie between Joe E. Brown, Some Like It Hot and Fred Astaire, On The Beach. Runners-up: Dean Martin, Rio Bravo; Rip Torn, Pork Chop Hill; George C. Scott, Anatomy of a Murder; Hugh Griffith, Ben-Hur.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Joanne Wpodward, The Fugitive Kind. Runners-Up: Maureen O’Hara, Our Man in Havana; Shelley Winters, The Diary of Anne Frank; Juanita Moore, Imitation of Life; Ava Gardner, On The Beach.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: The 400 Blows, d: Francois Truffaut. Runner-Up: Pickpocket, d: Robert Bresson.

Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho, based on a long-percolating script by the late Richard Nash (the novel version dates back to ’75) and co-written by the still-kicking Nick Schenk, was originally slated to open on 10.22.21. Then it was shuffled around and will now open on 9.17.21 with a simultaneous HBO Max release — Clint’s first streamer.

That’s two weeks before The Many Saints of Newark opens on 10.1, and the trailer for that just dropped. So where’s the Cry Macho trailer?

Cry Macho is essentially an older guy-younger guy relationship story…a piece about values, regrets, admissions, looking forward, wild roads. There’s an extensive synopsis for Nash’s 1975 novel on the Wiki page. Eastwood’s character, called “Miko” in the film, is a crusty old cuss; in Nash’s book he was a 38 year-old rodeo rider named Michael “Mike” Milo. Over the years various big-name actors including Roy Scheider, Burt Lancaster, Pierce Brosnan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were seriously interested in playing Miko/Mike.

Eastwood almost committed to starring in a film version in ’88, but he bailed in order to do The Dead Pool, a Dirty Harry film.

Here’s a shorter Amazon synopsis:

“Mike’s best years are behind him. There was a time when he was the best rider in the circuit, but a divorce and years of hard living have worn his body down. After an accident, his career comes to an abrupt end, but his boss gives him one last job: he must cross the border into Mexico, kidnap his boss’s son, Rafo, from his boss’s ex-wife, to be used as leverage in their ongoing divorce.

“Mike arrives to find the boy has already run away, and his plan is immediately exposed to the local police. When he finds Rafo living on the streets of Mexico city, supporting himself though petty crime and winnings from the occasional cockfight, Mike convinces the boy to come back to Texas. Still running from the law, the two set out on a journey northward that forges an unlikely friendship and forces both to reckon with the choices they’ve made in pursuit of being ‘macho.”

This is Schenk’s third collaboration with Eastwood after Gran Torino (’08) and The Mule (’18).

What makes us feel happy or at least comfortable or semi-content about things? Apart from discovering satori or enlightenment, I mean. (I happened to find this realm at age 19 by way of LSD and the Bhagavad Gita, but most many people haven’t a clue about this.) So what makes us feel reasonably good and assured about things?

In five words, a belief in the future. And, if you want to add nine more, the likelihood of a fair amount of sunny days.

Not a belief that a safe and semi-bountiful tomorrow is guaranteed (for that is promised to no one) but knowledge that I’ll have a reasonably fair shot at making good and necessary things happen…an ability to feed the fire and keep the wheels turning and in so doing sample the modest comforts of life (Italian shoes, scrambled eggs and a buttered English muffin, Criterion Blurays, an occasional trip to Rome or Hanoi or Key West) being more or less within reach.

What is the antithesis of this feeling? Well, one way of defining that would be the way I feel now. I love the idea of a flashing present and a robust future, but I don’t believe in it. I believe in my ability to keep working no matter what, as I never get sick and have always felt like I’m 37 (even when I was 21). I trust in my good genes and my general resistance to the usual maladies, and I love my wife, my sons, our two cats, the rumblehog and the endless trove of cinematic delights contained in my 65″ Sony HDR, and of course I cherish my large community of friends and colleagues.

But almost everything that Hollywood Elsewhere depends upon seems to be resting on thin ice these days. I don’t want to sound overly dour, but it all seems to be about a month-to-month luck of the draw and the direction of the sea breezes, which can be moody and temperamental. Fate is so whimsical. Very little feels steady and solid.