“A recent screening of Atlantique (aka Atlantics) was really good. So well captured. All the amateur actors were earthy and real. Not only was it about the desperation of boat refugees trying to get to Spain from impoverished Senegal, but woven together with a throughly believable story of true love. After the screening I spoke briefly with the delightful director/ ex-actress Mati Diop, and we talked about how hard it is to find real obstacles in telling love stories in the 21st century. This is a definite international feature Oscar nom. It will be hard to beat the current popular tidal wave of Parasite and Pain and Glory, agreed, but this is a seriously worthy contender.”

“Zero Tolerance,” a 54-minute Frontline report about the Trump administration’s war on immigration, began streaming four days ago. I’ll be watching it this weekend. Any reactions?

Boilerplate: “FRONTLINE investigates how President Trump turned immigration into a powerful political weapon that fueled division and violence. The documentary goes inside the efforts of three political insurgents to tap into populist anger, transform the Republican Party and crack down on immigration.”

“Everything about Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts seems tailored to the lowest-common-denominator ADD demo. Every line and scene is aimed at the peanut gallery. Every potential risk and thrill element (almost falling out of the passenger basket, climbing up the side of a balloon in frigid weather) struck me as cartoonishly crude and exaggerated. The recreations of early 1860s London felt about as genuinely atmospheric as the depictions of mid 1930s London in Mary Poppins Returns, which is to say “pass the crackerjack.” It all feels like a movie — a show for the shmoes.

“The bottom line is that I didn’t care very much about Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones above the clouds. One of them could have frozen to death (one almost does) or fallen to the earth and I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. I’ve had a problem with Redmayne ever since The Danish Girl, and especially since Jupiter Ascending. He has a deeply punchable face.

“Just as the voyage begins there’s a moment when Amelia Wren throws a small dog out of the basket about 150 feet up, but he lands safely with a parachute. (This was apparently a real-deal stunt that Blanchard or Graham did to amuse the crowds.) If only The Aeronauts had shown this stunt going wrong…if the parachute hadn’t opened and the dog had gone splat on the pavement, I would’ve respected it more. At least that would have been unexpected. As is, The Aeronauts is completely predictable and assembly-line.” — from “Aeronauts Ain’t For Me,” posted from Telluride on 9.1.19.

Eddie Murphy is going to perform some comic standup specials for Netflix. Reports have stated he’ll be paid between $40 and $70 million for these shows.

$40 to $70 million for telling jokes? Doesn’t that kind of drain the humor out of things? How funny can you be when you’re pocketing that much coin?

And what’s he gonna riff on? Murphy used to be about nervy material and envelope pushing. Obviously that’s out these days. You can’t do convention-defying comedy these days unless you’re some kind of despised outlaw renegade like Louis C.K. The wokesters have pretty much killed any semblance of a comic atmosphere…no?

A recent People article, quoting Murphy in a discussion with Today‘s Al Roker, said that “he’ll be working with different material now that he’s older and a father of 10.

“Last time I did stand-up I was 27 years old,’ Murphy said. “I look at some of my old stuff and cringe. Sometimes I’m like, I can’t believe I said that! I’m 58 now so I don’t think I’m gonna approach it the same way.”

In other words, no more jokes in the tradition of “Mr. T in a gay bar.”

Murphy told Roker he’s going to prepare for the Netflix thing by doing a tour of comedy clubs.

“You gotta go to the clubs [although] I haven’t started doing that yet,” he said. “I never wrote stuff out on paper. I would be having a conversation and I’d say something funny. And I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s funny,’ and I would go try it on stage. That’s never stopped, I’ve just stopped taking it to the stage.”

If you ask me Murphy permanently surrendered his funnyman card when he left the Oscar telecast after he didn’t win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Dreamgirls performance.

Donny Deutsch to Elizabeth Warren: “I’ll tell you one thing. You tell 160 million Americans that they can’t have or choose their private health care insurance, you’re gonna lose an election.”

Bill Maher (later in the show): “What do you think of polling that says 70% of Americans believe that the U.S. is on the verge of a civil war?”** Donny Deutsch: “You wanna see a civil war? Trump loses, he’s gonna tell people to take to the streets.”

** On 10.23 a survey by The Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service stated that the average American voter believes the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to the ‘edge of a civil war.’ The poll showed that when voters were asked to rate divisions in America on a scale of 0-100, with 100 being the ‘edge of a civil war,’ the mean response was 67.23.”