Day: September 21, 2016

Until I saw Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn‘s Amanda Knox (Netflix, 9.30) yesterday afternoon, I wasn’t fully convinced that the 29 year-old Knox was completely innocent of the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox had been sharing a small cottage with Kercher in Perugia, Italy, while studying as an exchange student. No hard evidence pointed to her guilt, but right after the murder Knox was fingered by Perugia police as a suspect, and soon after she began to be portrayed by tabloid journalists as some kind of deranged sex demon mixed with Lucretia McEvil, and we all know what women of her sort are capable of.

Ludicrous as this sounds, this is the impression I’d been fed but was too lazy to look into. I knew Knox had been convicted and exonerated twice by Italian courts (the second and final acquittal was rendered on 3.27.15 by the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome) but the coverage of her case had been so tainted with innuendo that there was (and still is in some quarters, I suppose) a suspicion that she’d somehow evaded justice. As recently as two years ago a mostly panned Michael Winterbottom film called Face Of An Angel toyed with the idea that an Amanda Knox-like femme fatale (played by Carla Delevigne) might not have been as pure as the driven snow.

Even if she hadn’t murdered Kercher Knox was still bad, the media myth went, because she’d fucked too many guys.

Read more

This Hidden Figures trailer is more cerebral and less lighthearted that the one that popped on 8.15, and therefore reflects the product reel that was shown during the Toronto Film Festival on 9.10. Less about chuckles, family and romance and more about science and discrimination and how truly gifted these women were. Wikipedia posted the limited 12.25.16 release weeks ago, but 20th Century Fox is still refusing to officially acknowledge this. The Christmas Day debut will of course allow for awards attention. Who will land the acting noms — Taraji P. Henson or Janelle Monáe, and in what category?

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. In Charley Varrick, John Vernon‘s Maynard Boyle is a mob-connected banker who is enormously relieved when Walter Matthau tells him he wants to return $750K that was unintentionally stolen during a Las Cruces bank robbery. After he hangs up, Vernon makes a gesture with his left hand that says “sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” It’s the most elegant piece of acting that Vernon ever performed, and yet when I mentioned this to Vernon on the set of Hail To The Chief in the spring of ’85 he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He all but ignored me, and I was probably the only guy on the planet who’d ever recognized, much less said to him, that his Charley Varrick hand gesture (it happens at exactly the 2:00 mark) was some kind of beautiful.

Hollywood Elsewhere has just contributed $100 to a Vidiots Indiegogo campaign to raise $65K. They need to move things into the 21st Century or words to that effect. Vidiots is basically a place to rent VHS films that haven’t made it to Bluray or streaming. I haven’t owned a VCR player for 15 years and I’m still vaguely irked at Vidiots for telling me I owed them $125 after I returned a lost-and-then-found VHS of The Wizard of Oz back in ’90. The total value of the VHS was maybe $75 — I refused to pay anything more than that. The Vidiots clerk insisted on the higher figure so I told him forget it and refused to pay them anything. I’ve contributed $100 because for all their obstinacy, Vidiots is a store with heart and spirit, and because its existence enhances the cultural character of Santa Monica.

Angelina Jolie to Tom Brokaw: “If this [movie] was anything close to our real marriage, we couldn’t have made it.” Uh-huh, and the issues that led to yesterday’s announcement of a divorce only manifested after she and Brad sat down with Brokaw?

Read more

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is throwing a two-hour party this evening for the award-season blogaroonies and strategists. The location is Eveleigh — a name that’s damn near impossible to remember. (Why don’t they just call it Everly? Beverly minus B = Everly brothers = simple.) I don’t know where this impulse is coming from, but I’d love it if tonight’s event could devolve into a friendly pie-throwing affair. A good-natured release of tension and pretension. Along the lines of that 1965 Soupy Sales segment when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Trini Lopez went at it.

Yesterday Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny announced he’s been cut loose, and that he’s starting a new fiction-driven site. (I pasted the URL somewhere but now I can’t find it.) Last year McWeeny got mad at me for suggesting that Hitfix had lost its soul by canning Kris Tapley, Daniel Fienberg and Gregory Ellwood. McQueeny’s view at the time was that “a difference in editorial direction doesn’t make it a bad place to work.” Uh-huh.

I just sent an email to Drew’s Hitfix address (Drew@hitfix.com), and it bounced right back. The courteous thing would have been for the Hitfix guys to keep his email address live for a month until he’s given everyone fresh contact info. But Hitfix can’t be bothered with that stuff.

I wrote McWeeny a portion of the following message this morning: “Despite your unrelenting ugliness towards me, I am not going to match your assholery by celebrating the loss of your Hitfix gig or wishing you ill. You are a gifted, hard-working, passionate writer, and I want to see you back in the swing of things because the discussion will be richer for that, despite your continuing allegiance to Comic-Conery and general fanboy crap.

Read more

A vote for Jill Stein will be a vote for Orange Hitler. Really, it will be. The basic idea in this Joss Whedon spot is that Millenials have to man up on 11.8 — shake it off for 24 hours — because the only thing that matters is preventing Orange Hitler from winning. That’s it, there’s nothing else, not even their feelings of disappointment about their ideals or dreams being unfulfilled. Millenials can go right back to their default emotions on 11.9, but on 11.8 they need to man up, hold their noses and vote for Hillary. Because Joss and Team Avengers (i.e., Tony Stark, Hulk, Black Widow, War Machine, etc.) really want them to do that. And because War Machine is entirely correct when he calls Orange Hitler “a racist, abusive coward who would permanently damage the fabric of our society.” Please, whining Millennials, don’t do it…don’t give us Brexit, Part 2: Apocalypse.