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When I got back to town this afternoon I went down to the local Time Warner office, exchanged the old modem (Motorola SBG6580) for the new one with the faster capability (Arris T61672G), and hooked up the newbie. I needed a Time Warner techie to help me get it right, but it’s now showing speeds between 117 mbps and 122 mbps.  The techie told me the speeds will gradually increase over the next few hours or days. Excellent. Except the new network is identified as “[user name] 5G” with the same password. Which means, of course, that the Oppo player, the Roku player and the Apple TV have no connectivity because they’re coded to communicate with the previous network. (I’ll figure it out tomorrow.) I’m dumped my cable entirely and am relying entirely on wifi and apps — better late than never.

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As I was taking pictures of the atmospheric remnants of the North by Northwest cropduster location, the Directors Guild of America was announcing its feature directing nominees. As I read their names under the warm Bakersfield sun I said to myself, “Thank God…now we finally know what the industry thinks…before we were lost in the woods, searching around in the dark, clueless. But now, finally, we know the score.”

The Revenant‘s Alejandro G. Inarritu, Spotlight‘s Tom McCarthy, The Big Short‘s Adam McKay, Mad Max: Fury Road‘s George Miller and The Martian‘s Ridley Scott…salud! Did anyone out there have any hint at all that these five would be nominated? I sure didn’t. I had no idea whatsoever.

Yes, I’m kidding. Yes, the DGA noms are a snooze. Yes, it was fairly clear who the five would be….well, a week or two ago. The most recent hottie is The Big Short‘s Adam McKay, but his inclusion fits in, of course, with everyone chattering about The Big Short climbing and/or gaining.

To what extent will the Academy go along with the DGA? Will they also reject Carol‘s Todd Haynes and Steve Jobs‘ Danny Boyle? Almost certainly. (more…)

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Daryl H. Thornhill, grandson of Roger Thornhill, has paid a visit to a hallowed place — a place where his ancestor was nearly murdered by machine-gun fire from a cropdusting biplane. Daryl is standing at “Prairie Stop, Highway 41” — actually an area near the intersection of Garces Highway and Corcoran Road near Wasco, a suburb of Bakersfield. Daryl is standing by the side of the road, taking shots with his iPhone 6 Plus. A SUV appears from nowhere, stops and a rural-type fellow in a brown suit gets out. Thornhill and Brownsuit regard each other from a distance of 60 feet or so. Thornhill decides to walk over and break the ice.

The only area that even remotely resembles the North by Northwest location, and it’s located about a mile south of the alleged shooting spot.

Thornhill: Hi. (pause) Hot day.
Brownsuit: Seen worse.
Thornhill: (Beat) Have you ever seen a film called North by Northwest?
Brownsuit: Can’t say I have ’cause I haven’t.
Thornhill: Well, a couple of websites say they shot a famous scene from that film right here, right on this spot. 12168 Corcoran Road.
Brownsuit: Can’t trust what you read on the web.
Thornhill: My thought exactly. It’s flat out here, but otherwise the area bears almost no resemblance to the area in the film. No corn crops, no tilled soil, no telephone poles. The area in the film looked like rural Illinois or Indiana. This looks like….well, not classic farmland at all. Desert scrub, fruit trees. It looks more like the area outside Ravenna in Antonioni’s Red Desert.
Brownsuit: Red Desert?
Thornhill: Another movie. (more…)

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Although I’m personally appalled by obese, junk-food-inhaling middle-class Americans, I believe that Bernie Sanders‘ proposals to cut them a financial break through social services is the right thing to do. I also believe that his scrappy, contentious attitudes about toxic billionaires are more genuine than Hillary Clinton‘s somewhat similar positions. And yet I’ve recently been easing out of my Bernie thing and warming to Hillary because, I’ve told myself, it’s better in the long run to support a Democrat who can definitely beat Donald Trump. And yet Bernie has been polling much better against Trump than Hillary, and now he’s got a five-point lead over Clinton in a new Quinnipiac University Iowa poll — 49 to 44 percent. That’s a 9-point increase for Sanders and a 7-point loss for Clinton since the last Quinnipiac poll in December. On top of which Sanders is leading by double digits in New Hampshire. Sanders has said all along that he’s the more electable candidate. Outside of Iowa and New Hampshire? I don’t know what to think or do or believe.

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I’ve been telling myself since moving to Los Angeles in ’83 that some day I’ll visit the site of the cropduster scene in North by Northwest. But I didn’t for the usual reasons (laziness, lack of discipline, pressed for time by work). Well, I’m doing it this morning, dammit. I drove out to Bakersfield last night, and my date with destiny happens in two or three hours after breakfast and whatnot. 12167 Corcoran Road near Wasco, about 50 minutes northwest of Bakersfield, 10 miles north of Highway 46. Major witnessings never happen unless you man up, fill the tank and drive there.

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Robert Egger‘s The Witch (A24, 2.19) debuted almost a full year ago at Sundance 2015. It re-appeared last September at Toronto Film Festival. Did I catch either showing? Of course not. Renowned for being uncannily frightening, I’ll finally attend a Los Angeles screening on Monday, 1.18. It opens a month later.

“This movie [is] so scary it not only freaks you out, it makes the world around you freak you out. You don’t sleep well the night after you watch it. You definitely try to do whatever you can to avoid any long walks in the woods or chores involving farm animals. It’s a stunningly impressive debut film from Robert Eggers, who did extensive research into New England folklore, combining various accounts and stories into this movie, which plays like the ultimate 17th century witch nightmare.” — posted today by Screencrush’s Matt Singer.

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In the wee hours of 3.22.76, David Bowie, Iggy Pop and two other guys were arrested at the Americana Rochester hotel for possessing “about half a pound” of weed. Bowie paid the bonds and then left for gigs in Springfield, Mass., and New Haven, Conn. He returned a few days later to plead innocent in Rochester City Court. “A crowd of about 200 police, fans and reporters looked on” as Bowie and his entourage were guided into the Public Safety Building, according to original reports in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Bowie’s “biggest greeting was the screams of about a half-dozen suspected prostitutes awaiting arraignment in the rear of the corridor outside the courtroom.”

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For the last two or three years I’ve been paying Time Warner for the fastest, triple-speediest, most supersonic wifi you can get. The pitch says it can deliver speeds up to 300 mpbs (megabytes per second), but whenever I’ve done a test on speedtest.net the counter averages roughly 72 mpbs. Which is pretty fast and all, but less than a third of the speed TW is promising at the maximum. Speeds vary according to this and that variable, of course. Tonight I was told by a TW rep that the modem/router I’m using — a Motorola Surfboard # SBG6580 — can only deliver speeds up to 100 mpbs. “You’re kidding,” I said. I was told to take this puppy down to the local TW office and switch it out for an Arris Wowser # TG1672G, which can deliver speeds up to 300 mpbs. So for the last two or three years I’ve been working at slower speeds than I could have enjoyed because I was too lazy to inquire. Brilliant. My name is Jeffrey Wells but my secret name is Seymour Butz.

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Three days ago a nattily dressed David Bowie offered a fine impression of a guy not dying from cancer. Consequence of Sound has posted photos taken of Bowie on Friday, January 8th — his 69th birthday and the release date of Blackstar, his final album — by longtime photographer Jimmy King. The site says these are Bowie’s final known photographs prior to his death last night.

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There’s one thing that needs attention in Michael Bay‘s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldier’s of Benghazi (Paramount, 1.15), the Benghazi action thriller that screens tomorrow night with an embargo date of 1.13. And that is how much attention and cred will be paid to an alleged “stand down” order given to six military contractors from a Benghazi station chief named “Bob.” Bay’s film is allegedly non-political, but a 1.9 N.Y. Post story by Reed Tucker reports that the contractors who spoke to Mitchell Zuckoff for his book “13 Hours: What Really Happened in Benghazi,” on which the film is based, say the stand-down order “happened.” This conflicts with the 2014 findings of a Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee, which was that “there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.”

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The final ballot for Broadcast Film Critics Association’s Critics Choice Awards, which will happen next Sunday (1.17) at 5 pm Pacific with a live broadcast on A&E, Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network, will be sent on Wednesday, 1.13. Fast turnaround. If (and again I say “if”) the BFCA hands their Best Picture award to The Revenant or a Best Director trophy to Alejandro G. Inarritu, it will be hard to deny a feeling of creeping uncertainty about Spotlight‘s inevitability. It wasn’t just The Revenant‘s Golden Globe wins but also the surprisingly large weekend take ($39,826,840) that may be giving pause to more than a few BFCA voters. Back in the early ’90s it was said of a prominent production executive that he was “a man with your opinions.” I’ve long suspected that more than a few BFCA-ers like to raise a damp finger to the wind before voting. Wednesday’s vote will be a test of that.

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Any serious journalist given a shot at interviewing El Chapo (a.k.a. Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera) would snap it right up. The honest ones would admit that, at least. So the criticism directed at Sean Penn’s 11,000 word Rolling Stone piece about his secret softball encounter with this infamous Mexican drug dealer boils down to the fact that he didn’t man up and ask tough questions. But how tough would any journalist be under similar circumstances? I’m asking.

A paragraph in Penn’s article indicates that his apparent motive for not doing a Mike Wallace-style interview ((apart from the fact that he hasn’t the training or the temperament of a journalist) stemmed from concerns about possibly getting whacked.

“The trust that El Chapo had extended was not to be fucked with,” Penn writes. “This will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the hazards. I’d seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded, exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists and cartel enemies alike. I was highly aware of committed DEA and other law-enforcement officers and soldiers, both Mexican and American, who had lost their lives executing the policies of the War on Drugs. The families decimated, and institutions corrupted.” (more…)

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I was getting that sinking feeling toward the end of season #3 of House of Cards. Robin Wright had decided to leave Kevin Spacey alone in the White House, but that didn’t mean she would soon be trying to take him down — her character is too classy and reserved and “loyal” for that kind of behavior. And so I was getting this shitty feeling that the story was feeling less decisive and a lot less interesting than it did during season #1 and #2, and that another season was in the offing because the producers decided they could get it away with it. I felt I was being led along. No more dragging stuff out!

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Tell me you don’t see something a little Pans Labyrinth-y in David Bowie‘s appearance in this “Lazarus” video, a cut off his final album, “Blackstar.” How many people are buying/downloading “Blackstar” right now? (I’m one of them.)

David Bowie has been right down inside me since the early ’70s, but never so profoundly as during a moment at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. A no-big-dealer that became a kind of wake-up and a comfort blanket. I was standing on a small, sloping beach outside a party that was starting to slightly settle down, and the DJ played “Fashion” and suddenly it all came together — the night, the mood, the tempo of the times, the shallow-ironic cultural attitudes of ’92 — and began to make my blood feel a bit richer and livelier.

David Bowie saw and touched and assimilated just so. He seemed to get the whole equation like no one else. These and other thoughts were swirling around in my head that night, at that very moonlit moment, and I whispered to myself “Wow…so awesome to have Bowie with me now.”

(more…)

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Urban Dictionary: “Describing a female with a delightfully sweet bosom; a delicious pair of breasts.” I had never heard the term “sugartits” since reading that a drunken Mel Gibson used it to address a California Highway Patrol officer in 2006. I haven’t used it on my own in any context since, not even in air quotes. But I’d be lying if I said I’m sorry that the term is with us, now and forever. It’s so Malibu, so AA, so…fascinating.

(more…)

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David Bowie is dead…good God! A major-league, avant-garde artist in music for several decades and, for a while, film. Particularly The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. An artist-rocker-maestro-writer-performer extraordinaire has slipped beneath the waves. This is like losing Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger. Cancer took the 69 year-old Bowie earlier today. I’m trying to think of my quintessential default David Bowie song, the one that I listen to more than the others, and it’s a six-way tie between “Fashion,” “Starman,” “Five Years,” “Suffragette City,” “China Girl” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Let’s make it an even seven by adding “Let’s Dance.” I can’t recap Bowie’s decades-long career at 12:10 am — too vast, too extensive, too many chapters. I saw him perform his Serious Moonlight tour at Anaheim Stadium in ’83 or thereabouts. I used to play “Under Pressure’ over and over again in the early ’80s when I lived in the West Village. Oh, to have attended an early ’70s performance of the Ziggy Stardust tour when Bowie had his glam space suits and red-rooster hair. Too much to remember, too much to take, and too damn melancholy. I need to sleep on it. The world is a slightly lesser place tonight.

(more…)

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The Revenant‘s triple-slam win at the Golden Globes tonight (Best Picture Drama, Alejandro G. Inarritu for Best Director, Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor) was a major surprise for everyone. Add the film’s unexpected weekend take of $39 million and you’re looking at a likely snowball effect. If (and I say “if”) next weekend’s Critics Choice Awards celebrates The Revenant in similar fashion the Oscar race will be wide open for bear. I still think Spotlight has the edge to win the Best Picture Oscar as the Globes are only the Globes, but there’s no denying that over the last three days The Revenant seemed to suddenly bust out of its cage. I don’t know how many “expert” handicappers didn’t predict tonight’s big win but I’ll guess that most were just as gobsmacked as I was. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them talk down the Revenant‘s triple-crown win tomorrow as big surprises like this make them look a little bit clueless. I asked several people at the 20th Century Fox after-party if they would have bet money on The Revenant doing what it did, and they all said “nope.”

Revenant director Alejandro G. Inarritu, Leonardo DiCaprio following tonight’s surprise Golden Globe win.

(l. to r.) Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Santa Barbara Film festival director Roger Durling, yours truly at 20th Century Fox after-party.

(more…)

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8:02 pm: Will The Revenant steal the Best Picture — Drama from Spotlight? Yes, that’s just happened. Shocker — really, really unexpected. What a mindblower, what an unexpected triumph…whoa. Who predicted a three-award sweep for one of the roughest sits of the year? The Revenant is the show’s wowser winner. The Spotlight guys must be in shock…sorry but again not sorry.

7:55 pm: The Revenant‘s Leonardo DiCaprio wins Best Actor – Drama. Huge cheers and screams inside the Fox tent. Fully deserved, obviously paving the way to Best Actor Oscar. Leo concludes his “thank you” speech with a little Marlon Brando flourish, paying tribute to Native Americans.

7:53 pm: Room‘s Brie Larson wins for Best Female Performance — Drama. Heavily predicted. I would have preferred Brooklyn’ s Saoirse Ronan. I’ll bet the vote was close.

7:41 pm: Jim Carrey wickedly mocking the “two-time Golden Globe winner” intro. And the Best Motion Picture Comedy award goes to The Martian, hands down the biggest laugh riot of the year. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the realm of the Golden Globes. HE to readership: What are your favorite laugh-riot moments in this wonderfully satisfying film? Seriously, The Martian is a very well-made entertainment. Cheers for any win it manages to get from the HFPA, no matter how loony the classification might be.

7:32 pm: Another surprise win — Jennifer Lawerence takes Best Actress Comedy award for Joy. Did anyone see this one coming? Thank God they didn’t give it to The Lady In The Van‘s Maggie Smith. I would have preferred a win by Trainwreck‘s Amy Schumer but this is fine.

7:23 pm: Alejandro G. Inarritu wins Best Director award for The Revenant! What a weekend for The Revenant with the unexpectedly huge box-office and now this. Sorry, Scott Feinberg, but no Gold Watch award for Ridley Scott. Fucking wifi just died in Fox Pavillion so I’m on the iPhone now. Okay, it’s back now. What a shocker. Did anyone see this coming? Very happy and gratified.

7:04 pm: Congested, cold-afflicted Tom Hanks introducing Denzel Washington, recipient of this year’s Cecil B DeMille Award.

6:57 pm: Mr. Robot wins for Best TV Series. No comment. Okay, I have a comment: Congrats!

6:53 pm: Ricky Gervais announcing that he’s “in the awkward position of having to introduce” Mel Gibson again after insulting him some years back. Kicker: “I’d rather have a drink with [Mel Gibson] tonight, in his hotel room, than with Bill Cosby.” Another: “What the fuck does ‘Sugartits’ even mean?” Best Golden Globes moment so far?

6:39 pm: Laszlo Nemes wins Best Foreign Language Golden Globe for Son of Saul! This is the first time tonight that things have really gone Hollywood Elsewhere’s way. It’s been a bit of a weird show so far. Hooray for Lady Gaga, whose facial features I’m still trying to assimilate and hang onto. Nobody cares about Best Song.

6:28 pm: Aaron Sorkin wins Screenplay Award for Steve Jobs, a movie that wasn’t especially lovable or satisfying and which tanked when it went wide? Spotlight was supposed to win this handily. This is the second Jobs shocker of the night after Kate Winslet winning for Best Supporting Actress, all but stealing it from Alicia Vikander.

6:19 pm: J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette announcing winner of the Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor award, and…Sylvester Stallone takes it. Okay, roll with it — Sly was very,very good in Creed. Kicker: “I’m gonna thank my imaginary friend Rocky Balboa for being the best friend I ever had.” But he doesn’t thank Ryan Coogler.

6:15 pm: Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson announced Golden Glove for Best Animated Feature: Inside Out. No joy in Mudville about this one. Anomalisa should have won. Bored with Pixar dominance. (more…)

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