A few hours ago Greg Gianforte, a Republican candidate for a Montana congressional seat in an upcoming special election, was charged with assault after apparently slamming Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, taking him to the floor and breaking his glasses and shouting, “Get the hell out of here!” Here’s a recording of the incident; another is below. Simmering hostility and suppressed rage are par for the course for a lot of rightwing guys. Obviously Gianforte has hurt himself more he hurt Jacobs.

The Guardian reporter sounds upset, naturally, just after the skuffle — “You just broke my glasses!…you just body-slammed me and broke my glasses!” But (and please don’t take this the wrong way) Jacobs also sounds, to me, just a tiny bit candy-assy. Not to the extent that it’s a problem, but his voice reminds me of a kid I knew in third grade who was always threatening to tell the teacher that I was throwing spitballs and making faces behind her back. But let’s not dwell upon that. Obviously the bad guy here is Gianforte.

I couldn’t get into tonight’s 10:30 pm screening of Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. I approached Les Arcades (77 rue Felix Faure) about 45 minutes before showtime, but the line was way too long. Hollywood Elsewhere will wait in reasonable-size lines, but not the kind that are so long they sap your will to live. HE friendo Aaron Salazar, an aspiring director, was at the very front of the line, but he began his vigil at 8 pm. I admire Aaron’s gumption, but no movie is worth a two and a half hour wait. There’s another screening on Saturday but I’ll be gone early Saturday morning. I’ll just have to see Baker’s film sometime this summer or certainly at Telluride/Toronto.

Late this afternoon I attended an Alfonso Cuaron Masterclass in the Salle Bunuel, which was basically the renowned director of Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Gravity sitting for an 85-minute interview with French film critic and author Michel Ciment. [A full recording is at the bottom of this page.] They discussed Cuaron’s career — chapter by chapter, film by film — and showed clips. Fine.

And yet Cuaron’s upcoming Spanish-language Roma, which he shot last fall and is basically about a year in the life of a middle-class, Mexico City family in the early ’70s, wasn’t even mentioned. Which disappointed me. I attended this interview not to hear Alfonso talk about Y Tu Mama Tambien or that fucking Harry Potter film or Sandra Bullock or the blood splatter on the lens in Children of Men for the 47th time, but to hear Cuaron speak about Roma at least a little bit…c’mon! Would it have killed him to discuss what it is and what he’s going for, to allude to the story a bit and maybe discuss the tone, themes and whatnot?

I asked Alfonso if there’s any chance of Roma coming out by the end of ’17, and he said “noahh…I didn’t make it.” Maybe it’ll show up at next year’s Cannes Film Festival (an especially good place to launch any quality-propelled, non-English-speaking film), he allowed. Or maybe a year from next fall….who knows? But what a drag that he didn’t even allude to it.

Yesterday N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott posted a tribute piece about the recently departed Roger Moore, titled “Roger Moore Was the Best Bond Because He Was the Gen-X Bond.” The gist was that “the older 007 installments” — the Sean Connery films, he means — “could never match the sublime, ridiculous thrill of seeing The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy on the big screen.

“Those movies were heavenly trash, with plots you didn’t really need to follow and sexual innuendo that struck my young eyes and ears as deliciously risque.”

Moore “exerted himself heroically,” Scott recalls, “grappling with villains atop a moving train, chasing them down ski slopes or into outer space, his unflappable suavity accompanied by an occasional smirk or upward twitch of the eyebrow. He knew exactly how silly these endeavors were, but he was committed to them all the same. He was an ironist and a professional, and as such a pretty good role model for post-’60s preadolescents.”

A nostalgic Gen-X take on the 007 films is fine, but let’s rub the fog off our glasses for a second, okay? Man up and rub that shit off.

There are only two Bond films that ever mattered and ever will matter, and these would be Dr. No (’62) and From Russia With Love (’63). These were the only Bonds that played the game with at least a smidgen of conviction. Yes, they smirked and nudged but they also took the solitary macho-stud assassin thing half-seriously, and they explicitly didn’t embrace the exploitational jizz-whizz approach (i.e., Bond films are about fantasy and made for the Disneyland crowd…why pretend otherwise?”) and were made with relatively lean and mean budgets. These two are the holy grail of the Bond franchise, and still the source of its power and mystique.

The great Sean Connery starred in these two but also in four other Bonds of gradually declining quality — Goldfinger (’64), Thunderball (’65), You Only Live Twice (’67) and Diamonds are Forever (’71). Goldfinger was diverting at times but the other three have become borderline unwatchable. I tried to make it through Diamonds Are Forever a year ago, and I just couldn’t take it. They’re mostly full of shit, these three films. Yes, even Thunderball. They don’t care about anything except flash, self-regard, cheap tricks and wank-offs.

Friend: “What did you think of Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled? I thought it was a slow–burning hoot. Coppola completely vacuumed out any of the original’s over-the-top sequences for more arthouse vibes and painterly pastoral framings. Those last 30 minutes are terrifically entertaining.”

Me: “Whoa, calm down on the ‘terrifically entertaining’. It’s pretty good, but not all that different from Don Siegel‘s The Beguiled. Less heated with more emphasis on suggestive humor. And shorter than the Siegel version by 11 minutes, 94 minutes vs. Siegel’s 105. Which I rather liked. Yes, the apple pie scene is amusing if not quite ‘funny’. I think Nicole Kidman barking “get the saw!” was meant to challenge Faye Dunaway shouting “get the axe!” in Mommie Dearest.”

Friend: “How about ‘Edwina! Bring me the anatomy book!'”