I won’t be arriving in town until 2:30 pm or so on Tuesday, 5.13. Not a chance of catching the 3 pm screening of Charles Chaplin’s 1925 classic (no narration, just music). I’ll have time to pick up the press pass, and not much more.

The Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, now known worldwide as Pope Leo XIV, seems like a mild-mannered devotional…sensible, practical, political-minded…a facilitator type…perhaps a Ralph Fiennes-y type of guy. What do I actually know? He doesn’t strike me as a fire-and-brimstone type. He has a face that says “okay, I get it, we be cool.” Willing to forgive.

Confession: I’ve never seen James Foley‘s After Dark, My Sweet (’90), which Roger Ebert insisted was “one of the purest and most uncompromising” film noirs ever, capturing above all “the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.”

I’ve decided to finally watch this respected but all-but-forgotten film, even though I suspect I’ll probably hate it. (I’ve come to fear adaptations of Jim Thompson novels — brutality and heartlessness are his calling cards.) Why am I catching After Dark, My Sweet regardless? I feel I owe it to the memory of Foley, who died from brain cancer earlier this week. He was only 71.

There’s no question that Foley’s At Close Range, written by Nicholas Kazan, will always be regarded as his masterpiece. It taught me to think of rural Pennsylvania as a place where blue-collar bad guys thrive and ugly things happen at night. Patrick Leonard‘s haunting score + Madonna‘s iconic recording of “Live to Tell”…perfect. Chris Walken‘s demonically twitchy performance as the sociopathic Big Brad is surely his all-time finest. Walken to Sean Penn in that third-act kitchen scene: “You think you have the guts?…to kill?…me?”

Foley’s direction of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) is also top shelf, although nothing will ever touch the original 1984 Broadway play version (which I caught on opening night with all the big-gun critics) with Joe Mantegna, Robert Prosky and the others. I’ve alwaye loved the slogan on the Glengarry film poster: “A film for everyone who works for a living.”

Yesterday “Los Bostonian”, while callously dismissing the AI-authored “Celluloid Renegades” script, complained there’s too little in the way of elemental film passion on this site…”rarely any discussion of editing, lighting, screenwriting, shot composition.”

Okay, here’s a riff on lighting, or more particularly a comparison between (a) Pawel Edelman‘s beyond-brilliant cinematography, fortified by his soft and subdued but wonderfully calibrated lighting, on Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy (’19), which I re-watched a couple of nights ago, and (b) the occasionally muddy, oppressively under-illuminated, at times barely discernible lensing of Sinners by Autumn Durald Arkapaw.

Each and every frame of the Polanski is a bath…an eyeball massage…a capturing of Belle Epoque Paris that never stops hitting the sweet spot…never over- or under-lighted, every shot as perfect as it could possibly be for a period film of this sort. Easily in the class of John Alcott‘s Barry Lyndon, if not in a class of its own.

Too many people have written that Arkapaw’s lighting of the second half of Sinners (i.e., the nocturnal vampire stuff) is so depressingly under-lighted that at times it’s borderline unwatchable. When images are this soupy, something is very wrong.

Edelman’s lighting expertise is so far above and beyond what Arkapaw is apparently capable of or interested in…it’s almost unfair to mention them in the same sentence.

Edelman’s credits include Taylor Hackford‘s Ray, Steven Zallian‘s All the King’s Men, Andrzej Wajda‘s Walesa: Man of Hope, and Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (masterfully lighted). Arkapaw shot Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (no great shakes) and The Last Showgirl (never saw it).

Fair enough?

Everyone knows that Joe Biden‘s arrogant decision to run for re-election two and a half years ago (i.e., right after the ’22 midterm elections) pretty much ushered in Trump 2.0. He fucked us, and in my book that makes him a really bad guy.

Asked on The View about his mental decline over the second half of his term, Joe muttered and wheezed and gurgled a denial of sorts.

And then wife Jill jumped in to shore him up during the interview’s second half. All through ’23 and ’24 Joe and his Democratic gaslighting squad did what they could to spin and dodge and obfuscate. Joe actually said today that had he stayed in the ’24 race, he would have beaten Trump. This is ridiculous!

What about the books that have been written about his cognitive decline? “They are wrong,” Joe mumbled.

Jill: “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us. If you look at things today, give me Joe Biden any time.”