WATCH: @Yamiche presses President Trump on the decision to downsize the White House national security staff, eliminating jobs addressing global pandemics.

The president calls it "a nasty question" and asserts that "I didn't do it." pic.twitter.com/ENFgvLGlfd

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 13, 2020

When I think of the sets and backdrops in Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women I think of (a) rural Massachusetts (woods, trails, fields), (b) various domestic interiors in that region, and (c) 1860s New York City. I realize there’s a scene on a beach, but why use a beach backdrop for the Bluray? It’s not Woman In The Dunes or Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Imagine issuing a 50th anniversary 4K UHD Bluray of Lawrence of Arabia and going with, say, a closeup of Peter O’Toole against a backdrop of downtown Cairo.

Why is Betty Gilpin‘s Hunt character named Crystal? That’s a girly-girl name like Fawn, Tiffany or Serenity, and not a good fit for a tough, quietly seething, physically fearsome character who’s more or less cut from the Clint Eastwood cloth. I found her performance irritating because she’s playing an attitude more than a recognizable human being — an attitude fed by barely controlled anger and not much else.

Crystal is naturally infuriated that Hillary Swank and her wealthy liberal cronies have arranged to hunt a few unlucky deplorables for fun and sport…I get it, of course, who wouldn’t be? But she’s so enraged she can’t be real and basic about it. She’s all twisted up.

It’s satisfying to see Gilpin bring pain and death to these liberal douchebags, but her behavior feels over-calculated. She seems acutely aware of the camera each and every second. Especially when she’s so angry that she hums. And I didn’t think her big womano e womano fight with Swank was anything special either.

I was also hugely annoyed by the resilience of the Hunt characters who are beaten, stabbed and shot within an inch of their lives. No matter what happens they all manage to somehow recover within seconds and rebound back to life, like they’re human tennis balls or something.

I realize that bad action movies began ignoring biological reality decades ago, roughly around the time of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and certainly with the advent of John Woo-styled X-treme violence in late ’80s band early ’90s. The fact is that a severe beating or shooting or stabbing will stop most people in their tracks and leave them moaning on the ground, and that it usually takes hours if not days to recover.

Forgive me for being unable to buy into the bullshit, but that’s what it is.

Every time I watch a film I’m always looking for actors who are just simply “there” and centered and behaving in a dead-real manner, and the others who are acting their asses off with all kinds of over-conveyed tells and twitches and facial indications. Actors who “act” are lethal.

Except in those very rare cases (many of them in Stanley Kubrick films) when a clearly “acting” actor is so brilliantly in command of his/her excessive behaviors that you just succumb and go with it. George C. Scott‘s performance in Dr. Strangelove, for one. Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer or Sleuth or Khartoum. Daniel Day Lewis‘s in There Will Be Blood.

Incidentally: In ’77 I saw Dick Cavett perform the lead role in Simon Gray‘s Otherwise Engaged. Stage acting is a whole different deal, but Cavett, I distinctly recall, tried to play it way, way down. The idea was to convey emotional detachment, and he wasn’t bad in that regard. But he wasn’t a gifted performer either. No one expected anything stupendous, and he didn’t disappoint. Rumor had it that Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay were better.

Watching Contagion is fascinating, but at the same time oddly comforting. Because unlike what we’ve seen from the Trump White House, it’s largely about sane, scientific-minded, non-ideological CDC people dealing with the virus spread as best they can, in a relatively calm manner, and persistently. And it’s about a virus that’s much more deadly than the one we’re coping with now. We may be looking at a million U.S. deaths before this is over, but the Contagion virus death count is in the tens of millions.

Whether or not Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive or not for the coronavirus, it’s ludicrous for White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham to have stated that President Trump and Vice-President Pence, who dined and shook hands with Bolsinaro last weekend (along with his communications director Fábio Wajngarten, who’s definitely tested positive), “do not require being tested at this time.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, who attended the Trump-Bolsinaro dinner in Mar a Lago, is self-quarantining as we speak. Sen. Ted Cruz announced today that he’s extended his self-quarantine after meeting in his D.C office with Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s Vox Party who tested positive this week.

And yet Trump, who should obviously be setting an example, isn’t even planning to submit to a COVID-10 test. Worse, he “has disregarded the advice of medical and public health professionals to stop shaking hands,” according to a CNN story filed earlier today by Clare Foran.