Rick Famuyiwa‘s Confirmation (HBO, 4.16) stars Kerry Washington as Anita Hill, and The Wire‘s Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas. Greg Kinnear as Sen. Joe Biden, Treat Williams as Sen. Ted Kennedy, Dylan Baker as Sen. Orrin Hatch plus Jennifer Hudson, Jeffrey Wright, Eric Stonestreet, Bill Irwin, Kimberly Elise, Grace Gummer, Erika Christensen. Screenplay by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich)

The annual Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Women’s Panel (i.e., Creative Forces: Women in the Business) came off smoothly and without a hitch today. Moderator Madelyn Hammond kept the ball in the air with the help of panelists Susan Cartsonis (producer, Storefront Pictures), Svetlana Cvetko (cinematogrqpher — The Architect, Inside Job, Red Army), Alison Eastwood (director, Battlecreek), Liz Garbus (director — What Happened, Miss Simone?), Shannon McIntosh (producer, The Hateful Eight) and Rosa Tran (producer, Anomalisa). Best line: Cvetko’s stating that her core belief — “Be yourself” — was passed along during an impressionable moment by a very wise cab driver.

(l. to r.) producer Shannon McIntosh, director Allison Eastwood, director Liz Garbus, dp Svetlana Cvetko, producer Susan Cartsonis, producer Rosa Tran.

(l. to r.) Madelyn Hammond, Cvetko, Cartsonis, Tran.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead at age 79, probably of a heart attack. Glory hallelujah! A toxic right-winger, an enemy of Roe vs. Wade and Obamacare, a supporter of Citizens United, a chronic enemy of gay marriage and affirmative action, voted with Bush on Bush vs. Gore…urinate on his grave.

Online and Twitter reactions have been in the realm of great comfort and joy. President Obama will of course nominate on of his own, and the Supreme Court will be a less conservative body at the end of the day. Rabid Congressional righties will probably try to stall any confirmation hearings until after the inauguration of President Trump.

A spokesperson said that Scalia, in Texas for a hunting trip, went to bed Friday night, told friends he wasn’t feeling well. He didn’t rise for breakfast the following morning, and the group he was with left without him. Someone eventually went in to check on the guy and found him unresponsive. Sometimes there’s God, so quickly!

For whatever reason I decided to watch John Sturges‘ Marooned (’69) yesterday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies. I was in my hotel room and fiddling around and suddenly there it was, and since I’d never actually watched it start to finish I figured “why not?…in 2013 Alfonso Cuaron told Wired magazine that he watched over and over as a kid.” Maybe so but Marooned is an embarassment — comically inauthentic, a stiff. Compared to the verisimilitude of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13 and Gravity it’s like an Ed Wood film. How could Sturges, a tough pro who knew from quality, have made something this mediocre? Poor Gregory Peck, poor David Janseen, poor James Franciscus, poor Richard Crenna, poor Gene Hackman, poor Nancy Kovack, poor Lee Grant, poor Mariette Hartley, etc. They all behave as if they’d just been told they have cancer. From Wiki page: The 1970 Mad magazine satire of Marooned, called Moroned, described story events in actual film time. NASA officials are pressed to launch the X-RT — ‘the Experimental Rescue Thing’ — in ‘about an hour…maybe…an hour and a half, tops”. One astronaut sacrifices his life to escape the film critics.”