When I think of the sets and backdrops in Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women I think of (a) rural Massachusetts (woods, trails, fields), (b) various domestic interiors in that region, and (c) 1860s New York City. I realize there’s a scene on a beach, but why use a beach backdrop for the Bluray? It’s not Woman In The Dunes or Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Imagine issuing a 50th anniversary 4K UHD Bluray of Lawrence of Arabia and going with, say, a closeup of Peter O’Toole against a backdrop of downtown Cairo.

Why is Betty Gilpin‘s Hunt character named Crystal? That’s a girly-girl name like Fawn, Tiffany or Serenity, and not a good fit for a tough, quietly seething, physically fearsome character who’s more or less cut from the Clint Eastwood cloth. I found her performance irritating because she’s playing an attitude more than a recognizable human being — an attitude fed by barely controlled anger and not much else.

Crystal is naturally infuriated that Hillary Swank and her wealthy liberal cronies have arranged to hunt a few unlucky deplorables for fun and sport…I get it, of course, who wouldn’t be? But she’s so enraged she can’t be real and basic about it. She’s all twisted up.

It’s satisfying to see Gilpin bring pain and death to these liberal douchebags, but her behavior feels over-calculated. She seems acutely aware of the camera each and every second. Especially when she’s so angry that she hums. And I didn’t think her big womano e womano fight with Swank was anything special either.

I was also hugely annoyed by the resilience of the Hunt characters who are beaten, stabbed and shot within an inch of their lives. No matter what happens they all manage to somehow recover within seconds and rebound back to life, like they’re human tennis balls or something.

I realize that bad action movies began ignoring biological reality decades ago, roughly around the time of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and certainly with the advent of John Woo-styled X-treme violence in late ’80s band early ’90s. The fact is that a severe beating or shooting or stabbing will stop most people in their tracks and leave them moaning on the ground, and that it usually takes hours if not days to recover.

Forgive me for being unable to buy into the bullshit, but that’s what it is.

Every time I watch a film I’m always looking for actors who are just simply “there” and centered and behaving in a dead-real manner, and the others who are acting their asses off with all kinds of over-conveyed tells and twitches and facial indications. Actors who “act” are lethal.

Except in those very rare cases (many of them in Stanley Kubrick films) when a clearly “acting” actor is so brilliantly in command of his/her excessive behaviors that you just succumb and go with it. George C. Scott‘s performance in Dr. Strangelove, for one. Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer or Sleuth or Khartoum. Daniel Day Lewis‘s in There Will Be Blood.

Incidentally: In ’77 I saw Dick Cavett perform the lead role in Simon Gray‘s Otherwise Engaged. Stage acting is a whole different deal, but Cavett, I distinctly recall, tried to play it way, way down. The idea was to convey emotional detachment, and he wasn’t bad in that regard. But he wasn’t a gifted performer either. No one expected anything stupendous, and he didn’t disappoint. Rumor had it that Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay were better.

Watching Contagion is fascinating, but at the same time oddly comforting. Because unlike what we’ve seen from the Trump White House, it’s largely about sane, scientific-minded, non-ideological CDC people dealing with the virus spread as best they can, in a relatively calm manner, and persistently. And it’s about a virus that’s much more deadly than the one we’re coping with now. We may be looking at a million U.S. deaths before this is over, but the Contagion virus death count is in the tens of millions.

Whether or not Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive or not for the coronavirus, it’s ludicrous for White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham to have stated that President Trump and Vice-President Pence, who dined and shook hands with Bolsinaro last weekend (along with his communications director Fábio Wajngarten, who’s definitely tested positive), “do not require being tested at this time.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, who attended the Trump-Bolsinaro dinner in Mar a Lago, is self-quarantining as we speak. Sen. Ted Cruz announced today that he’s extended his self-quarantine after meeting in his D.C office with Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s Vox Party who tested positive this week.

And yet Trump, who should obviously be setting an example, isn’t even planning to submit to a COVID-10 test. Worse, he “has disregarded the advice of medical and public health professionals to stop shaking hands,” according to a CNN story filed earlier today by Clare Foran.

Early this evening I risked exposure to COVID-19 by going to a mediocre film (The Hunt). I Ubered to the AMC Barton Creek, which cost around $15. There was a fair amount of traffic on the way — many Austinites were risking death like myself. The theatre is inside a typically lavish mall, and I didn’t see a single person there over the age of 30. No middle-aged or white-haired couples, no little kids — just 20somethings.

At best the movie is tolerably blah. Too much in the way of kidding and arch behavior. Bite is smaller than bark.

Plus I hated watching it with tight plastic surgical gloves on my hands and that stupid N95 mask around my neck. What a ghastly thing it is to be afraid of infections and surfaces in everyday life, to be afraid of death and disease at every turn. I washed my face and hands four times — once after the screening, twice while wandering around Austin, again at a gas station on South Congress.

I took a city bus to downtown Austin, and was a bit surprised to discover how different it looks and feels compared to six years ago, when I was last here. Many big new buildings, a little more corporate, a bit less in the way of native personality.

We’re all living in a movie. Each and every sizable congregational activity — conventions, concerts, sporting events, Broadway shows — is being cancelled as we speak. The 3.20 opening of A Quiet Place 2 has been scrubbed, and I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time before regular movie theatres begin to close. Press screenings of new films will cease also — films that decide to open regardless will only offer online screeners. Exhibitors had been hurting before this — now it’s even worse for them. Poor fellows.

Pretty much the entire country is going under closed-door quarantine for the next couple of weeks, and maybe longer. Only the bold and the reckless will be out and about. Amazon, Netflix and Disney+ ratings and sign-ups will soar, of course.

I am nonetheless planning to attend a 7 pm screening of The Hunt at the AMC Barton Creek Square 14 (2901 So. Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX 78746). I have my COVID-19 gear — N95 face masks, plastic surgical gloves — along with the black cowboy hat and tinted distance glasses.

It’s conceivable that The Beast, a longtime germophobe, wasn’t infected with COVD-19 after coming into contact last weekend with President Jair Bolsonaro’s communications chief Fabio Wajngarten, who has since tested positive. If Trump or Pence are infected they’ll never admit it, of course. But as I said two or three days ago, if the Gods have a dark sense of humor…

Restored, 60 frames-per-second HD, color tinting, sound-augmented. Posted ten days ago. This kind of simulated realism of times and cultures past is a relatively new thing, and quite the unfettered window. Imagine Owen Wilson‘s Midnight in Paris character sampling 1920s Paris in this fashion, with most of the ancient artifacts eliminated. As I mentioned the other day, I’d really like a chance to re-savor classic Hollywood films at 60 fps. I know the purist argument against this, but where would be the harm to simply make 60 fps versions available?

Last month West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim told 60 Minutes that he’s never liked “I Feel Pretty,” and is therefore totally fine with the number being dropped from the current Broadway show.

“I Feel Pretty” is probably my least favorite West Side Story song — to me it feels overly jubilant and forced — but I’ve never minded Sondheim’s engagingly witty lyrics. This is precisely what Sondheim dislikes. Decades back he told Diane Sawyer that Maria, a Puerto Rican “street” girl, would never say “it’s alarming how charming I feel.” Sondheim wrote this lyric, he said, because he was young and showing off. Maria, he maintained, “should speak in street poetry, not in literary poetry.”

There is obviously sound artistic reasoning behind this viewpoint. It’s dishonest and phony for a young, minimally educated Puerto Rican immigrant to express herself in the lyrical manner of 27 year-old Sondheim, a sharp, well-educated Jewish sophisticate who grew up in the San Remo. I get it.

But I’ve never minded the affectation because I vastly prefer to live and reflect in the mind of someone like Sondheim, because he’s clever and urbane knows a thing or two. There’s an artful way to write dialogue (and lyrics) for under-educated characters with somewhat limited vocabularies, and it’s certainly more authentic to do this. But I’ve never minded and in fact have always enjoyed the fantasy notion that characters who don’t know much could somehow speak from a wise and cultured perspective.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that given a choice between hanging with (a) an unusually perceptive and eloquent character who doesn’t talk like he/she would in real life and (b) an inarticulate, primitive-minded boob, I prefer the former. Happily. Because I’ve never liked being stuck in the minds of people who don’t have much of a clue.

In On The Waterfront Marlon Brando‘s Terry Malloy is a rugged, simple-minded fellow with a less-than-worldly of things, but screenwriter Budd Schulberg had him speak with a certain abbreviated, side-angle, world-weary eloquence that really works in certain scenes. When Malloy begs Eva Marie Saint‘s Edie not to leave the saloon in which they’ve been sitting and talking, he says “please don’t…I got my whole life to drink.” That’s an Iceman Cometh line, and hardly one that a lunky longshoreman and an ex-boxer would cough up. But Schulberg would, and it’s beautiful moment despite the unreality.