HE is pre-approving Tina Satter‘s Reality (HBO Max, 5.23). Directed by Satter from a screenplay she co-wrote with James Paul Dallas and adapted from the FBI interrogation transcript of American intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner, pic premiered with glowing reviews during last February’s Berlinale. Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton on top.

“Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realized piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.” — from Tim Robey’s Telegraph review.
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Yesterday World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy passed along a report that roughly the first 20 minutes of Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix) will be presented in black-and-white. This in itself is intriguing.

Cooper has starred, directed, co-written and co-produced the upmarket Leonard Bernstein biopic, which will almost certainly debut at the early fall festivals, allegedly runs in the vicinity of 156 minutes.

“Lenny and Felicia,” posted on 5.31.22: Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix), a biopic about legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, only began shooting this month. It will almost certainly open during the early fall Oscar season of 2023, as it is obviously Oscar-bait plus and Cooper’s makeup after his direction of A Star Is Born failed to land a Best Director nomination in early ’19.

With Maestro we’re talking Best Picture (produced by Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Todd Phillips, et. al.), Best Director and Actor (Cooper), Best Actress (Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife of 27 years, the half-Chilean Felicia Cohn Montealegre), Best Original Screenplay (Cooper, Josh Singer) and so on down the line. Jeremy Strong costars as John Gruen.’

As much as I despise Donald Trump and his torrents of bullshit, he’s regarded by millions as a symbolic pushback against woke Maoism. And therein lies the essence of why MAGA nation is allegedly behind this lying animal, as poll after poll seems to indicate.

Factually and ethically speaking there’s no question that the 76 year-old Trump is a foam-at-the-mouth sociopath, and yet two nights ago CNN honcho Chris Licht gifted this beast with what boiled down to a 70-minute promotional pro-Trump event in the form of a televised New Hampshire q & a with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

I was flying during the Trump-Licht-Collins airing and only just caught up with the substance of it this morning (Saturday, 5.13). The 5.11 analysis piece from N.Y. Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman is obviously valid, and there’s no basis from which to argue that Collins wasn’t fairly disputing Trump’s lies with verifiable facts.

And yet what she and the never-Trumpers are saying would seep into the political bloodstream much more deeply and effectively if there was simply a frank, sensible, fair-minded acknowledgment that woke Maoism is not fanciful fiction. As Bill Maher pointed out three months ago, it’s not only real but malicious.

Which is worse, the Trump psychosis or a fanatical reincarnation of Mao Zedong’s Great Cultural Revolution? It would be so great if there were more voices (like Maher and others from the sensible, straight-from-the-shoulder moderate camp) saying that both extremes are grotesque.

Even Steve Schmidt, whom I’ve admired and respected since he was portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Jay Roach‘s Game Change (’12) as well as for his many blistering condemnations of the looney-ass right, has posted a great essay bashing Trump and Licht, but he would be heard and agreed with by many more millions if he could just admit the obvious about hard-left derangement.

“If the challenge were to pick out CNN’s lowest moment, its most disgraceful 90 minutes, it would be easy. It is incontestably the disgrace that was aired on CNN and ordered by CNN’s CEO and chairman Chris Licht, dressed up as news. [It was] a propaganda event — a forum given to Trump voters and sycophants….national gaslighting…America’s greatest liar lying with abandon.

“CNN’s Kaitlin Collins was the person strapped to Chris Licht‘s proverbial Titanic bow, [having] been given the challenge of trying to challenge Donald Trump when he lied. But she faced an upstoppable force.

“Chris Licht didn’t do this for news. He didn’t do this to educate. He did it because he’s a profiteer, just like Rupert Murdoch…in the business of manufacturing news. What he did was incite a clearly unstable person who seeks political power for the advancement of an extremist agenda. [It] was a business decision…[an event] aimed to make money. [Licht decided] to throw Trump a propaganda rally, to stack an audience full of his sycophants, and then celebrate it as news. The event that Licht produced was evidence of American’s sickness and decay.”

— from Schmidt’s on “why CNN’s Donald Trump Town hall was an affront to journalism,” posted yesterday on 5.12.23.