What killed Burt Reynolds‘ career as a top-dog Hollywood movie star? His decision to star in a string of lowbrow shitkicker films, most of which were directed by his buddy Hal Needham, who started out in the mid ’50s as a stuntman. Under Needham’s Lubistch-like guidance Reynolds starred in Smokey and the Bandit (’77), Hooper (’78), Smokey and the Bandit 2, The Cannonball Run (’81), Stroker Ace (’83) and The Cannonball Run II (’84). It’s generally understood that Reynolds stabbed his career in the heart when he turned down the astronaut role in James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment in order to make Stroker Ace, allegedly out of loyalty to Needham. Today it was announced that Needham, 82, has passed. Condolences to family and friends, but he was one of the worst directors to ever make a dent in this town. No, wait…I didn’t mean that. Well, actually I did. The Cannonball Run II was one of the most throughly cynical and poisonous films I’ve ever sat through (that Frank Sinatra cameo!), and I actually paid to see the damn thing in a Times Square theatre. If you’ve ever cared about the wondrous transportation of cinema, the films of Hal Needham will always be a must-to-avoid. But I’m sure he was a nice guy and a good friend, etc. He knew how to kick back and have a good old time. Yeehaw! If given a choice between leading a Needham-type life and the kind of life lived by Eric von Stroheim or Franz Kafka or John Huston, I’m guessing that most Americans would choose the Needham path.

As I understand it Nikki Finke‘s latest eruption about being “locked out” had something to do with Deadline management (i.e., owner Jay Penske) having just installed a new editing system by which Finke would be able to post and edit her own material (i.e., mostly box-office reports) but not reports by other Deadline contributors, despite the site’s “About Us” page stating that Finke’s title is General Manager and Editor in Chief. (The site is primarily edited by Patrick Hipes, Denise Petski and Erik Pedersen.) It also has something to do with Finke having apparently made a technical error in posting a story earlier today about ex-Warner Bros. honcho Jeff Robinov hooking up with Sony, Dune Capital Management and GK Films. I’m also told her Penske Media contract, which runs until June 2016, doesn’t allow her to start a competitive news site, although Finke is apparently otherwise persuaded. “I am building out NikkiFinke.com and will unveil it right after the new year,” she recently tweeted.

Critic, essayist and screenwriter F.X. Feeney, renowned for his brilliant perceptions and occasional big-hearted essays on behalf of disputed films that less engaged critics should (he feels) make more of an effort to get, has riffed on Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s The Counselor. The piece appears in a N.Y. Times comments section following Manohla Dargis‘s positive 10.24 review.

“The Counselor is a superb movie, and how gratifying to find myself in agreement with my pal Ms. Dargis! For I’m otherwise puzzled that so many of my fellow critics are dumping on it. One colleague even cracked, ‘Too many words and not enough plot.’

“The words are there like music — it’s a spoken musical. The submerged ‘plot’, the intricate maze of treacheries happening offstage [that prey] upon the nameless hero, are not being denied us as story points. They’re being held at horizon distance so that we can concentrate, as [Michael Fassbender‘s Counselor] must, on the tragic recognition forced upon him by choices he made well before we came upon him.

“There are a lot of other movies that give us the beat-to-beat tick-tock on drug deals, cartels and treacheries, and disappearances in Juarez. Those are thrillers. Happy endings are part of their contract with us, and [are] essentially false. [Counselor screenwriter] Cormac McCarthy is not out to thrill but take us (and himself) to a place both inevitable and surprising because Fate is in play and will not be cheated. Ridley Scott has the courage to get in the game with him.