For the first time I have an idea of what Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25) will actually sound and feel like, dialogue- and behavior-wise. The previous trailers have been all moody whirlysmash cut-cut-cut impressionism. Brad Pitt‘s line about how drug dealers “don’t believe in coincidence” was, of course, first spoken by John Vernon in Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick. What is this, the sixth or seventh trailer we’ve seen for this film?

The American rural right showed its racist colors when Barack Obama began running for president in ’07. Then came the Tea Party, a rural-southern-white movement that was more of a response to the Obama metaphor (multi-culturalism is the new reality, whiteys don’t exclusively run the show any more) than Obama himself. Obama has been in office five years now. Is there anyone who thinks that it’s a “whoa” to talk about the racist under-agenda in this country? Yes — The Butler director Lee Daniels. When CNN’s Piers Morgan asks if he thinks America is a more or less racist country since Obama’s election, Daniels says, “Wow…that’s a powerful question!”

A little while ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone mentioned a form of pushback that I’m calling the Perv Retort. If you’re a straight male columnist and you’ve gotten really riled up by the performance of a young and beautiful actress (like Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos), it’ll be presumed by the community at large that you’re expressing a form of libidinal arousal and are therefore off-balance to some extent. Therefore your opinion has to be at least partly discounted because you’re probably using one hand to write and the other hand to do something else.

Same thing if you’re a gay male columnist and you’re really taken with a performance by a young male actor or a really good-looking actor in his 30s or 40s, even. It will be widely presumed that your perceptions have been colored by your day-dreaming about this actor in a certain context, and therefore your opinion about his performance being award-worthy goes right into the trash can.

Legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard, who wrote thousands upon thousands of the most beautifully shaped sentences and digressive dialogue riffs I’ve ever read in my life and who incidentally influenced the living shit out of me, has ascended and is now hanging out with Dennis Farina. A stroke took him down. He was 87. A Detroit guy through and through. Well, a Bloomfield Hills guy. **

Leonard wrote and wrote and wrote for…what, sixty-five years straight? He never stopped working and enjoyed a brilliant hot streak during the ’80s and ’90s. And he boiled the bullshit out of his prose each and every time he put pen to paper. And he was nice enough to talk with me on the phone a few times during my reporting days with Entertainment Weekly and People and the L.A. Times Syndicate. He didn’t even hiccup when I called him “Dutch” a couple of times.