Earlier today Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, announced her candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

This makes her the first Republican to challenge a certain bloated sociopathic mob boss, who may or may not emerge triumphant in the ’24 Republican primaries but hasn’t the slightest chance of defeating President Joe Biden in the general election.

Even with a majority of Americans persuaded that Biden is too old for a second White House term, Donald Trump‘s criminal record and sociopathic compulsions will prove a strict no-go. Which means there’s a half-reasonable chance that Haley or Florida governor Ron DeSantis (if and when he announces) could prevail.

And yet Haley has shown over the last couple of years that she’s a Trump toady, or at least is willing to sound like one, and is hence saddled with the appearance of an ethical problem. A case against her has been laid out by Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant who worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. The essay is titled “Nikki Haley Threw It All Away.” Here’s a taste:

“As governor, Haley’s defining action was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain South Carolina Black people felt to the pain she experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she saw her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia.

“‘Iremember how bad that felt,’ Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. ‘That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.’

“Then came Donald ‘you had some very fine people on both sides’ Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had ‘hijacked’ the Confederate flag and that ‘people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.’

“In her 2019 book, ‘With All Due Respect,’ Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not referencing him in her 2016 Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist ’the siren call of the angriest voices.’

“It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.

“It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the Access Hollywood tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had ‘lost any sort of political viability’ not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she ‘would not run if President Trump ran,’ then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump in the primary.

“There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.”

I’ve written two or three times about an extremely rare one-sheet for The Presbyterian Church Wager, which is what Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (’71) was called before it was twice re-titled. After learning of the original title certain Presbyterian Church honchos objected to their church being associated with the superficially tawdry subject matter (prostitution, gambling, opium use). The initial re-title was John Mac Cabe (the last name strangely spelled as two separate words), and then it became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

What I’ve never conveyed until this moment was that I first learned of the existence of the Presbyterian Church Wager one-sheet when I saw it hanging in the interior lobby of the Beverly Canon theatre (205 No. Canon), a renowned art house for which the late Jerry Harvey (later of Z Channel fame) was the programmer and manager in the ’70s.

Posted on 4.16 20: “As a proud owner of a Presbyterian Church Wager poster (along with Larry Karaszewski, Anne Thompson and Svetlana Cvetko), I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen this French-market poster for sale (can’t find it online) or if they know somebody who has one on their wall? How odd that the designer decided to change the last name of Warren Beatty‘s character from John McCabe to John Mac Cabe.

Posted on 5.6.19: A couple of days ago on Facebook, Larry Karaszewksi, the renowned screenwriter (along with partner Scott Alexander), director, producer and co-chair of the Academy’s Foreign Language Oscar executive committee, posted a photo of a rare cultural artifact — a framed poster for Robert Atman‘s The Presbyterian Church Wager, which later became McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Until Larry posted this I was under the impression that only three Los Angelenos owned mint-condition TPCW posters — Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, myself and dp Svetlana Cvetko.

The poster hanging in my living room is an expensively scanned digital copy of an original that Thompson loaned me in 2008. Three copies were made. I asked Warren Beatty if he would be good enough to sign them. I dropped them off at Beatty’s home, and after two or three weeks I was told they hadn’t been signed. I waited another week or two, and then, not wanting Beatty’s gracious pledge to become a thing of any kind, I decided it would be better to just say “okay, no worries but let’s forget it…I’ll just come by and pick them up un-signed…no harm, no foul…thanks for pledging assistance but it’s totally okay if it can’t work…you’re a good fellow and thank you.”

The next day his assistant told me the one-sheets had finally been signed. I said “thanks enormously” and picked them up later that day.

A part of me would honestly love to work for Dunkin’ Donuts. A very small part of me. A micro-sliver. Okay, I hate the idea. Plus I might not have the character for such a job. Okay, I don’t have the character for it — let’s be honest about this.

The great Tom Luddy, co-founder and artistic director of the Telluride Film Festival…a gentle hombre who always greeted and treated me like a brother and who long ago turned me on to Adam Curtis‘s The Century of the Self, a gift that I’ve never gotten over…a world-travelling cinematic sophisto who understood everything, knew everyone and always championed this or that overlooked film…Tom Luddy has died at 79.

I first dealt with Tom through my Cannon Films employment in the mid to late ’80s. Four films which Luddy produced or associate produced — Barfly, King Lear, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Manifesto and Powaqqatsi — were financed by Cannon, and I was the in-house press kit writer. (I’ve never re-written anything in my life as much as I rewrote the Barfly press kit — Barbet Schroeder made me chisel and rephrase it over and over — I couldn’t even read it after the umpteenth try, but Schroeder taught me the meaning of “truly hardcore.”) And then Tom and I rekindled when I ran into him at the San Francisco Film Festival in the early aughts. And then Telluride, of course, which I began attending in 2010.

If you were ever lucky enough to attend a Frank Sinatra concert (which I did in Long Beach back in ’83), you’d know all about Sinatra’s emotional body language as he sang a song. He would act out the lyrics and the feelings. Luddy would do almost the exact same thing when speaking to the Telluride press contingent at the start of the festival. He would lean forward and convey his heart vibes about this and that film, gently grinning and making eye contact with some of us. You could really feel the fervor. Luddy’s regard for great cinema was religious…evangelical at times.

Roddy McDowall in heaven: “Is that how one says it? As simply as that. ‘Tom Luddy is dead…the soup is hot, the soup is cold…Luddy is living, Luddy is dead.’ [beat] Boast that you were honored to speak his name even in death! The dying of such a man, must be shouted, screamed! It must echo back from the corners of the universe. ‘Luddy is dead! Tom Luddy of Telluride lives no more!”

From Telluride rep Shannon Mitchell: “It is with deep sorrow the Telluride Film Festival announces the passing of its founder and inspiration. Tom Luddy died peacefully on February 13, 2023, in Berkeley, California after a long illness.

“Tom was a force in the film industry for nearly six decades. He had a life-long love and passion for film, and a tireless dedication to film restoration, distribution, and exhibition. His presence will be profoundly missed by the many people whose lives were touched by his kindness, artistry, and his innate ability to bring people together to make something beautiful.

“’The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,’ reflects Julie Huntsinger, Telluride Film Festival Executive Director. ‘I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some. But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor, and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He called Telluride a labor of love for a very long time. We’re so much better off because of him and that labor.

“We at the Festival owe it to him to carry on his legacy; his commitment to and love for cinema, above all.”

40 years ago I was profoundly moved by Carlos Saura’s Carmen, the best of his Flamenco trilogy. It had erotic fire, shook my soul, opened me up to the passion of Spanish dance. It stayed in my head all through the ‘80s, ‘90s, aughts and teens. It’s never left me. In ’02 I felt something similar from the finale of Pedro Almodovar’s Habla Con Ella (‘02), which ended with a sublime dance moment.

…if Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t relied on that fake-looking process shot. If I’d been in Hitchcock’s shoes, I would’ve had Universal’s prop department build a special wind-up mechanical dummy, one capable of moving its arms and legs a bit. Then I would’ve mounted the downward-facing camera on the railing of the actual Statue of Liberty torch, and then I would’ve simply dropped the dummy and filmed the long fall.

Then, in the editing phase, I would’ve shown Lloyd losing his grip and starting to fall, then a quick shot of Robert Cummings‘ horrified expression, and then cut to the falling dummy and stay with it until hits the pavement below. I would also have recorded the sound of a cluster of three tied-together watermelons slamming into the pavement from a height of, say, three or four stories.

Happy 104th #NormanLloyd
Saboteur, 1942, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Robert Cummings and Norman Lloyd.
"Statue of Liberty" scene.
pic.twitter.com/T4NDXyQWUD

— Sergio Rodríguez (@Sergiofordy) November 8, 2018

Gabrielle Marceau is a Toronto-based writer, film critic, editor and instructor. She writes film and pop culture criticism as well as poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Cinemascope, Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot and Leste magazine. And she has written adversely of Women Talking, which was adapted and directed by a fellow Toronto person and Canadian Sarah Polley. This strikes me as significant.

Excerpt: “True to its title, the film is chock-full of conversations — moral, practical, theological — that feel, more often than not, formulaic and dry. The characters are not simply mouthpieces for different sides of an argument, but neither are they fully realized.

“They are Salome (Claire Foy) and Mariche (Jesse Buckley), voicing righteous, satisfying anger; Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey), interjecting with wisdom and pragmatism; two young girls whose presence reminds us of what’s at stake; and Ona (Rooney Mara), the philosopher, who turns their arguments over and over in her soliloquies, until they are smoothed into benevolent sentiment. If there were a main character, it would be Ona; but her equanimity is frustrating, and her monologuing perhaps the most jarringly monologue-like of the cast.

“The performances are hindered by an approach to storytelling that is literal to the point of obnoxious. (A prime example: over a character’s rhapsodic plea that the community’s young teenage boys be allowed to go with the women should they leave, we see dreamy shots of boys playing in the fields and chatting warmly.)

“The film feels suspended in an unreal world, an effect only heightened by the inexplicable blue tint of the cinematography and the tedious shots of empty church pews and silent kitchens. And though the film is based on a real story — for her 2018 novel of the same name, Miriam Toews was inspired by a Mennonite community in Bolivia where over a hundred women reported being assaulted by men in the community — it cannot transcend the inherent artificiality of allegory.

“[Women Talking] feels as isolated from its real-world analogue — the #MeToo movement and the revelations of sexual misconduct in the film industry — as the colony is from the outside world.”

Friendo: “Seriously, she could win. What Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, Till director Chinonye Chukwu and Woman King helmer Gina Prince-Bythewood have unintentionally done is power her chances.”

HE: “Agreed. That wasn’t their intention, of course, but it was obvious what effect their sore-loser schtick was having when Michelle Yeoh essentially said they should suck it up, lick their wounds and wait in line, like she did for years.”

Words can’t describe how thoroughly repulsed I am by the idea of watching yet another DCU Warner Bros. film, not to mention one that insists on torturing me with the return of General Zod (Michael Shannon)…Lord!

How do I know that The Flash (Warner Bros., 6.16) will be equal to being roughed up by gorillas? The fact that Andy Muschietti is the director, that’s how. Ten years ago I had dropped to my knees in praise of Mama, a subtle, and suggestive horror film which Muschietti directed and co-wrote (and which was produced by Guillermo del Toro). And then Muschjietti sold his soul by directing It (’15), which was aimed at morons by throwing subtlety to the wind, and then It Chapter Two (’19).

Let me get this straight: There are two Bruce Waynes in The Flash, one played by Michael Keaton and another by Ben Affleck, neither of whom are spring chickens. But only Keaton suits up as Batman…right?

Keaton’s version of Wayne hails from an alternate universe. Put another way The Flash ignores Batman Forever (1995, Val Kilmer) and Batman & Robin (1997, George Clooney), in which Keaton was a non-entity. Affleck, on the other hand\ “reprises his DCEU role as Bruce Wayne / Batman, the original version of Wayne from Barry’s timeline and the leader of the Justice League.” Which means it’s some kind of multiverse bullshit, right?

The last 72 words of Amy Holden Jones’ Facebook post, which appeared within the last couple of days, are stark and true and sad. The passage begins with the words “but help me.”

HE to Amy: “Here’s a pretty good answer to ‘what the hell happened to cinema?’ It comes from not just my own thoughts and observations but those of a few others, and it’s called “Don McLean’s ‘The Day The Academy Died.” It was posted on 9.25.22.

Gregg Moscoe and Alex Simon also stirred the pot:

Final HE thought: “Vote for that Riseborough!”