Just as a 5 pm screening of Paul Schrader‘s Dying of the Light was ending, the stories about Bill Cosby‘s latest and 15th accuser, Janice Dickinson, began to break. Three or four hours later the news broke about Netflix cancelling their Cosby special, which would have aired on 11.28. How many more women are going to come forward now? Are you telling me that NBC is going to go ahead with that new Cosby series in the wake of all this? Get outta here. The 77 year-old Cosby, who brought all this upon himself by his own hand (and particularly his own you-know-whatty), is about as finished as a once-high-riding, top-of-the-mountain superstar can be. 11.19, 10:45 am Pacific Update: It’s being reported that NBC has pulled the plug on Cosby’s planned series.

A couple of weeks ago I sat down with the kindly and serene Abderrahmane Sissako, director and co-writer of the well-crafted Timbuktu, the Mauritanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Timbuktu was respectfully received at Cannes last May, but it’s one of the grimmest films I’ve ever sat through. Grim. My personal idea of misery is no wifi or sitting through an awful film or being dropped by a beautiful girlfriend who was magnificent in the sack. Misery in Sissako’s film, which is set in the Timbuktu region of Mali, a mostly barren African nation that few people in this country have heard of and wouldn’t give a shit about if they have, is much more hard-core. Forget about it. Shot in Mauritania, it’s about the 2012 occupation of Timbuktu by Ansar Dine, a relentlessly purist, wacked-out Islamic militia dedicated to enforcing Sharia law and order. The film was partly inspired by a public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok, in eastern Mali, but that’s just another pebble in the pond. I think we all know about the pitch-black souls of nutter Islamics by now.

Timbuktu director and co-writer Abderrahmane Sissako, translator Myriam Despujoulets during our interview at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.

Timbuktu is in no way boring. Sissako knows how to tell a riveting tale and keep you engrossed, but good God. This is a film about dirt-poor hardscrabble types living in various states of misery and deprivation, powerless, at times terrified and always subject to rigid judgments and brutalities. An awful way to live. If there’s an uglier, crueler, more inhumane, more rancid belief system or culture than Islamic fundamentalism, I’d like to know what it is. The earth needs to be absolutely cleansed of this scourge. Welcome, western audiences, to life in one of the worst ideological desert prison camps ever created. Watching Timbuktu, for me, was like squatting on dirt at the bottom to a mine shaft, accompanied only by the flame of a single candle and surrounded by snakes and rats and bugs. Call Orkin, the extermination specialists.

Yesterday AMC Theatres began offering an unlimited Interstellar ticket to AMC Stubs members for those wishing to immerse themselves in Chris Nolan‘s masterpiece as many times as they wish. The prices vary from $19.99 to $34.99, depending on the location. (Presumably the lower end of the pricing scale applies to Interstellar fans who live in outlying regions.) Some 330 AMC theaters are participating in the promotion. I’ve seen Interstellar twice, but that’s all for now. I’ll be seeing it one more time when the Bluray comes out so I can watch it with subtitles. How many HE readers have seen Interstellar two or three times, and how many find AMC’s unlimited viewing offer attractive?

It seemed to me that Sony Classics’ classy, upmarket ads and trailers for Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher were having a limited effect. But the coarse, mass-market cartoon-ization of Foxcatcher (this four-day-old trailer, that poster for Tom Shadyac‘s Foxcatcher) has struck some kind of chord, and suddenly this somewhat gloomy, unquestionably well-made melodrama seems to be “happening” in the same way that There Will Be Blood began to “happen” when mp3s of “I drink your milkshake” were heard over and over. If Sony Classics’ marketers were bold, they would create a new stop-motion “animated” teaser of their own that makes some kind of metaphorical use of foxes, badgers, weasels, etc. You know something is happening here but you’re not quite sure what to do with it, are you, Mr. Pirrone? Does George Orwell‘s “Animal Farm” ring a bell?