A Washington Post story posted at 2:55 pm Pacific: “A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

“In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

“The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.”

“On Monday morning, Post reporters saw [this woman] walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover ‘stings’ that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.”

After last Saturday’s “2018 Hotties” post, I added several titles and then tried to reorganize the whole thing. Right now I’ve got 20 strong-sounding features, a good percentage of which could end up as awards-bait fall releases (The Irishman, Roma, Back Seat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Wife). Plus 7 upmarket genre films plus 13 likely standouts from (in no particular order) Benh Zeitlin, Yorgos Lanthimos, Laszlo Nemes, Clint Eastwood, Garth Davis, Richard Linklater, David McKenzie, Joel Edgerton, Robert Zemeckis, Wes Anderson‘, John Curran, Jennifer Kent, Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Verhoeven.

That makes for a total of 40 noteworthy 2018 films to look forward to, of which maybe 20 or 25 will deliver the real goods…who knows? But the year is already looking pretty nifty. And none of these fall under the category of mind-melting, idiot-brand, superhero franchise CG Asian-market slop. And yet I am looking forward to Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther as well as Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp.

Topliners: 1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano); 2. Adam McKay‘s Backseat (Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell); 3. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke); 4. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots (w/ Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce); 5. Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer, Bryce Gheisar, Alek Skarlatos, Thomas Lennon, Jaleel White, Tony Hale, P.J. Byrne).

6. Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 7. Terrence Malick‘s Radegund (August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jürgen Prochnow, Bruno Ganz; 8. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); 9. Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed, John C. Reilly); 10. Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Diego Luna, Dave Franco).

11. Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (15-year period from the formation of Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury up to their performance at Live Aid in 1985) w/ Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Lucy Boynton. 20th Century Fox, 12.25.18; 12. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons); 13. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex; 14. Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (costarring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber); 15. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet.

It was announced two days ago that Rance Howard, father of director Ron Howard and actor Clint Howard, had passed at age 89. Rance reportedly played a sheriff in Cool Hand Luke, which I happened to re-watch last week on a Miami-to-LAX flight. Due respect but I honestly don’t recall anything he said or did in that Stuart Rosenberg flick, and I can’t find a decent frame-grab either.

There’s one Rance role I’ll never forget, though, and that’s the shepherd (i.e., “irate farmer”) who ushers several sheep into a City Council meeting in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown (’74) — “Tell me where to take ’em! You don’t have an answer for that so quick, do ya?” (Rance arrives sometime after the 2:00 mark.)

Time magazine has been publishing for 94 years. It was a major, highly influential news weekly for…what, a half-century? Time is still respected with a circulation of 3 million plus, but it’s been decreasing in influence since the late ’90s. I have this idea that Time mattered in a necessary, must-read cultural sense in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, but that’s just something I’ve pulled out of my ass. Maybe it also mattered in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m mentioning this because Time is all but dead now, having agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation in a deal backed by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire fucktards who aren’t Trump supporters but have otherwise come to represent the worst anti-progressive forces in this country, everything evil and toxic and fossil fuel-y. From N.Y. Times story: Meredith, which publishes popular monthly magazines like Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens, has arranged for a $600 million cash infusion from the Koch brothers through their private equity arm, Koch Equity Development.”

From “Year One: The Mad King,” an 11.10 New York Review of Books piece by Charles Sykes: “Less than a year into his presidency, we hear the same question again and again: What will it take? What has to happen for Republicans to break with their Mad King?

“The honest answer is: Who knows? Whatever people have said has to happen has, in fact, already happened, over and over again, and the GOP has swallowed it anyway. A year ago, Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump’s attacks on a Mexican-American judge a ‘textbook definition’ of racism, but today Ryan is one of Trump’s most reliable and chirpy cheerleaders. Every line has already been crossed, every norm broken, every standard of decency shattered and yet four out of five GOP voters still back him.

“Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.

My recollections of Paul Schrader‘s Blue Collar (’78) are on the vague side. It was reasonably well regarded back in the day, or so I recall. But I couldn’t remember much about the plot. I could only recall three angry, financially struggling auto workers (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto) pulling off a half-assed heist, and things becoming worse as a result. So I read Vincent Canby‘s N.Y. Times review (which ran on 2.10.78) and I still couldn’t recall anything. That’s usually a bad sign.

During filming of Blue Collar, sometime in ’77: (l. to r.) Paul Schrader, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor.

So rather than buy the forthcoming Indicator Bluray (which pops on 1.22.18), I think I’ll just rewatch it via Amazon streaming.

Blue Collar‘s production history was unstable and conflicted. A recent Cinephilia & Beyond piece reports that “filming was tumultuous.” At one point Pryor pulled a gun on Schrader and refused to do any more than three takes. “Pryor was the unhappiest person I ever met,” Schrader said on a voiceover commentary. “After about three weeks in, I was in the middle of the set and all of a sudden I started crying and…couldn’t stop.”

Schrader later admitted that “Pryor’s best performance would be found in those second or third takes and that he would become bored and begin to improvise from thereon, to the annoyance of Keitel.”

“A day did not go by without some form of provocation,” Schrader recalls. “Either physical or verbal or walking off [the set]. It was just trench warfare.”

Blue Collar was widely praised by critics. (I think.) Roger Ebert liked it. I’ve already rented the streaming, but I have an idea that a making-of doc might be more interesting.

To go by an 11.26 Guardian interview, Susan Sarandon is still loathed by the left. Deeply. Not so much for trashing Hillary Clinton (many lefties voted for Clinton while holding their nose) as her support for Bernie Sanders and particularly Jill Stein, whose presence on the Presidential ballot may have helped Donald Trump win the White House. Stein, for example, got 51,463 votes in Michigan, but Trump won that state by 10,704. Similar tallies prevailed in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Sarandon tells the Guardian‘s Emma Brockes that voting for Jill Stein in New York State was a harmless protest vote. “I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]…it was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein.”

Brockes asks Sarandon if she really said that Hillary is “more dangerous” than Trump. “Not exactly, but I don’t mind that quote,” Sarandon replies. “I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.” Sarandon’s view isn’t that extreme. Peter Kuznick, co-author with Oliver Stone of “The Untold History of the United States,” said roughly the same thing three years ago. “Hillary’s foreign policy is very dangerous,” he said. “[She’s] Margaret Thatcher…such a smart woman, but such a simplistic narrative.”

In an 11.26 Forbes piece about the box-office performance of Justice League, you can sense that Scott Mendelson is not coming from a neutral place. He sounds like a Warner Bros. marketing guy trying to cheer up exhibitors about the viability of the DC brand. ($481 million and climbing! Yay, team!) Then again Mendelson does allude to the fact that the Justice League budget is “so big that a $600 million-plus worldwide total is cause for alarm.”

That references an 11.20 report by Forbes‘ Rob Cain that forecasts a possible $50 to $100 million loss, due to Justice League costing $300 million to make and $150M to market, which requires worldwide earnings of $750 million just to break even. ‘

Mendelson adds that “if Justice League continues to play somewhere between Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the film may just flirt with $250 million domestic, or about what Tim Burton’s Batman earned back in 1989.” Yeah, 28 years ago. But these days, the 1989 dollar is worth $1.97. Which means that by today’s yardstick, Batman‘s domestic earnings, which were actually $251,188,924, come to $494,842,180.

“Justice League is still alive, but it’s not yet well,” Mendelson concludes. “It held up just well enough to give a little hope for the next two weeks, but not well enough for anyone to pop the champagne.”

Who outside of certain cast members and Warner Bros. employees…who would want to celebrate the box-office success of Justice League? That would be like celebrating the triumph of the dark side over the rebellion.

A 4K Criterion Bluray of Tony Richardson‘s Tom Jones (’63) will pop on 2.27.18. A rompy, infectious, occasionally bawdy 18th Century comedy-adventure, it was one of the first critically respected films to break the fourth wall. Or was it the first? To audiences in JFK’s America it was really quite the amusing stunner when Albert Finney interrupted a conversation with some 18th Century character to glance at Richardson’s lens and offer a side quip or two.

Full of rude energy and goaded by the spirit of the British New Wave, Tom Jones also used jumpy handheld photography, freeze frames, whimsical narration and, as I recall, at least one instance of speeded-up photography. It felt like a prank, a lark, a mad bomb, and it completely jettisoned the steady-as-she-goes, well-regulated tone of mainstream cinema that was par for the course back then. On 4.13.64 it won the 1963 Best Picture Oscar along with Oscars or Best Director (Richardson), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.

A 2014 Backstage piece listed 14 films that broke the fourth wall (Annie Hall, Funny Games, Fight Club, Amelie, High Fidelity, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, etc.) but didn’t mention Richardson’s film…weird.

True story: A director who’s been in the trenches for many years recently heard from a woman who worked as his assistant back in ’87. They hadn’t crossed paths in eons but suddenly an email arrived, and it was tersely worded: “I have something I need to talk to you about.” Right away he felt the fear. The director has always been a kindly gentleman sort, but things were different 30 years ago. He began to scratch his memory and ask himself, “Was there ever a moment in which I might have crossed some kind of line with this woman?” Please, God…tell me nothing even slightly improper occurred as I love my life and I don’t want to die. A current of anxiety began to creep into his bloodstream. Anyway, he reached out and the former assistant rang or something, and it turned out that she’d written a script that she wanted him to read. Whew.

Adam McKay‘s Dick Cheney biopic with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong. Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots. Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign for The Wife. Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased starring Lucas Hedges. Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here. Alex Garland‘s delayed Annihilation.

Not to mention Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex. Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdelene. Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, he Won’t Get Far on Foot. Robert Zemeckis‘s The Women of Marwen. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet. Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favorite. And John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick.

All of them 2018 releases, and numbering 19. Not bad for a starting roster.

What follows is a copy of an 11.20.16 piece about likely award-season contenders of 2017, but with the links changed to 2018 forecasts:

It’s time to spitball what the Best Picture hotties will be twelve months hence, or just after the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday.

Every January I begin to compile a list of likely or at least promising-sounding goodies. I thought I’d start a little earlier so that by New Year’s Day I’ll have a half-decent 2018 roster to build from. It’s always hard to cut through the smoke and try to figure out what might poke through. Right now I can’t see much out there. If you check the usual sites and sources (Wikipedia, Box-Office Mojo release schedule) it’s all the same old nauseating crap — the usual mind-melting, idiot-brand, animal-friendly superhero franchise CG Asian-market slop.

Theatrical films are slowly dying, certainly if you go by the product being cranked out by the five families these days, but never say die. Netflix, Amazon, Megan Ellison, A24, Scott Rudin, Sony Pictures Classics…anyone and anything that turns the key. Ambitious theatrical fare…what is that these days? Most believe the form can only go downhill, but the discipline of having to put it all together and cram it into 95 or 110 or 125 or 140 minutes (as opposed to the relative ease of sprawling Westworld-like longforms)…there’s something so vivid and extra-feeling when movies somehow manage to do that thing and deliver like it matters. I wouldn’t want to live in a realm in which people aren’t trying like hell to keep doing this, each and every year.