In a just, fair-minded world, this photo of James Corden kissing (!) Sean Spicer at the Emmys last night would be processed as the same kind of political faux pas as Jimmy Fallon mussing Donald Trump’s hair. Or, if you will, Sammy Davis, Jr. hugging President Nixon at a 1972 youth rally. Or the big studio chiefs of the early ’30s giving handshakes and back-pats to Georg Gyssling, the Nazi party member and ally of Joseph Goebbels who became the German consul to Los Angeles in 1933. Does Corden seem to be a soul-less, gut-less, unprincipled toady? Yes, he does. If Corden could be transported back to 1975 and flown to Phnom Penh, would he give a backrub to Pol Pot? I see Corden and Spicey singing Queen’s “Bicycle Race” together…no?

Hulu’s The Handmaids Tale won all those Emmys because it sent a message about resisting authoritarian governments. HBO’s Big Little Lies, essentially a series about women resisting and defeating men with cruelly perverse mentalities, won because the metaphor fit the political climate. Sean Spicer rolling onstage and more or less saying “I said some very questionable things and embraced assholery while serving as President Trump’s press spokesperson”…that spoke for itself. Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon winning, obviously. HBO’s The Wizard of Lies lost, in part, because despite Barry Levinson‘s obviously negative view of Bernie Madoff‘s widespread malice, there was a collateral ooze factor because Madoff came from the same New York financial culture as Trump.

Incidentally: (1) If eligible I would have never voted for HBO’s The Night Of in any capacity because of (a) the focus on John Turturro‘s problem with foot eczema (i.e., dermatitis), and (b) the writers doubling down by allowing the poor man to find a Chinese herbal cure for this revolting affliction and then bringing the foot eczema back at the very end — unforgivable! (2) I would have voted for Feud up and down, but Ryan Murphy‘s series lacked political resonance. (3) Three cheers for the total snub of HBO’s totally infuriating, puzzleboxing Westworld (“I hate this series with a passion for just layering on the layers, for plotzing, diddly-fucking, detouring, belly-stabbing, meandering and puzzleboxing to its heart’s content”)

I suffered through a few recurring-theme nightmares in my early childhood. Gorillas, drowning in quicksand, boxer dog chefs walking around on their hind legs and wielding carving knives, frying in the electric chair. But none of these generated the feelings of dread and terror that I developed in my teens and 20s over the prospect of a blue-collar, wage-earning life.

For many years I was absolutely horrified by the idea of having to get up at 6 am and report to work by 8 am or earlier, and being stuck with a physically demanding manual-labor job, especially in cold weather. My father was an advertising guy who always wore a suit. He commuted on a train and was never expected at the office before 9 or 9:30 am. That, to me, was a civilized, managable approach to work and earning a salary. Grunt-level blue-collar work always struck me as a brutal, punishing activity — the kind of work that was guaranteed to make you feel miserable and frustrated and drive you to drink in your off-hours.

I was stuck with miserable jobs in my late teens and early to mid 20s (working for a furniture company, driving a delivery truck for a lumber yard, chain-link fence, tree surgery). I was finally freed from that treadmill when I broke into New York journalism in the late ’70s. If I’d never broken out of that blue-collar cycle…I don’t want to think about it. But it would’ve been awful.

On 11.21 Kino Classics will release a Bluray of David O. Selznick and John Cromwell‘s Since You Went Away (’44), a domestic wartime drama that runs nearly three hours. The Bluray contains the 177–minute roadshow version while Wikipedia lists a general release version running 172 minutes.

I can watch The Best Years of Our Lives over and over, but I can’t invest in watching a nearly-three-hour woman’s film starring Claudette Colbert. She was mildly alluring in the ’30s (Cleopatra, It Happened One Night, Midnight) but something intensely stodgy and conservative overtook her in the ’40s. Plus she was a Republican and a Reagan supporter, and she had a short neck.

Since You Went Away is famous for a sentimental railway station goodbye scene between costars Jennifer Jones and Robert Walker, who’d been married for four or five years at the time of filming. But Jones had been having an affair with Selznick since ’43, and the couple was going through a bitter divorce; they parted soon after Since You Went Away was completed. The farewell scene was parodied in Airplane! (’80 — clip after the jump)

The father of actor James Cromwell, the elder Cromwell was a kind of house director who churned out audience movies in the ’30s and ’40s (The Prisoner of Zenda, In Name only, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) before shifting into film noir (Dead Reckoning, The Racket). The poor guy was blacklisted from ’51 through ’58. His last significant film was The Goddess (’58), which was thought to be based on the unhappy personal life on Marilyn Monroe.

The top vote-getter for The Toronto Film Festival audience poll (called for promotional purposes the “Grolsch People’s Choice Awards“) is Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The first and second runners-up are Craig Gillespie‘s I, Tonya (stab me with a fork) and Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name.

Hollywood Reporter award season pulse-taker Scott Feinberg called the Three Billboards win an “upset” because he’d been predicting Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water for the win. I suspect that TIFF audiences appreciated Shape as far as it went (i.e., sex with gill-man) but they really liked where Three Billboards went at the end — away from anger, turning it down, acceptance.

The Midnight Madness Award went to Joseph Kahn’s Bodied (winner), Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 and James Franco’s The Disaster Artist.

From Pumpkin Spice Cheerios URL: “Made from real pumpkin puree and a delicious blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. It’s fall in a box! This seasonal flavor is going to be a pantry staple…but make sure to grab a box as it’s only available for a limited time.”

“I saw mother! with an almost full house last night in East Hampton, New York. An older, dare I say erudite crowd — I don’t know how I got in. It played well until the end. One walk-out in front of me that I saw. A lot of uncomfortable laughter during the post-birth pass around. And then a little stunned silence at one critical moment. The very end plays pretty cool with some people, those who were giving what they’d just seen a pass because of the payoff. That’s the sense I got from chatter on the way out. But Mrs. McCuddy isn’t forgiving me any time soon. She turned and said ‘That’s the worst movie ever made.’ And we aren’t remodeling the country home any time soon either.” — HE’s own Bill McCuddy.

“No. It’s more like Aronofsky meets Salvador Dali or Luis Bunuel (they were friends). It’s a Surrealistic Pillow. It’s the year’s best movie to watch high. But it’s not something to literally pick apart at the seams. That takes all the fun out of it.” — Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson.

John Carpenter to the critics who’ve been wetting themselves over Get Out since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 1.24.17: “I’ve been quiet over the last eight months because Jordan Peele‘s a sharp, savvy actor, comedian and filmmaker, and he deserves his day in the sun. But Get Out was a tribute to me, okay? To the kind of mid-budget socially reflective genre satire that I used to make. I’m the godfather, I own the patent, and now that Oscar season has begun I want a little acknowledgment of this. Okay, Larry Cohen might have been another inspiration, along with, I suppose, The Stepford Wives. But have any of you pricks even mentioned my influence in your reviews? Would you even say the name Carpenter if I didn’t grab the mike and say ‘c’mon, what the fuck, guys…let’s be fair about this’?

Gastone Moschin, the Italian actor who played Don Fanucci in The Godfather, Part II and a fascist bad guy in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Conformist, died twelve days ago (9.4.17) at age 88. He was living in Terni, Italy. The family spokesperson apparently didn’t feel that announcing his death in a timely manner was a matter of urgency, and that’s okay. Everything in its time.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach? No offense but he’s not good-looking enough. If I was a girl or a gay guy I wouldn’t be interested. He looks like the best friend of the bad guy. Am I allowed to say this? Of course not. I’m still looking forward to seeing Tokyo Project, which lasts all of 32 minutes.

Offer American moviegoers a chance to try something a little different, a film that’s a bit more complex and fibre-rich and challenging than the usual bowl of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, and they will lunge at Tony the Tiger every time. That is who and what Americans are for the most part — lazy, pleasure-seeking, popcorn-munching toads.

If you were paying any attention to the online conversations from Toronto over the last several days, you knew that Darren Aronfosky‘s mother! was something you had to see this weekend. It might not be your cup of tea or it might thrill or levitate you, but if you had the faintest interest in the latest topic du jour and keeping up with the Joneses in terms of cafe chatter, mother! was essential viewing. 

Well, Joe and Jane Popcorn didn’t even show up yesterday. mother! made around $3 million and will nab just under $8 million by Sunday night, but it earned a relatively rare F from Cinemascore.

(l.) Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s L’Age d’Or, released in 1930 to great controversy; (r.) Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, released yesterday by Paramount Pictures.

Yes, Paramount sold it as a conventional horror film, which mother! certainly isn’t. But content doesn’t seem to have been a factor. It would be one thing if a sizable nationwide crowd paid to see mother! yesterday and decided they didn’t like it….okay, fine. But they didn’t even show up. It was like they could smell what mother! was selling and just said “nope!” When people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop ’em. But Jennifer Lawrence can be proud — she really put herself out there and scored with a difficult, leap-of-faith, swan dive of a role

Obviously we’re looking at two Americas in terms of horror-film fare — one that loves cheaply superficial, teen-friendly, empty-headed horror films like IT (which I hated and which has made $274,310,619 worldwide so far) and another that savors the idea of smart, occasionally metaphorical, ahead-of-the-curve horror flicks like mother!, The Babadook, The Witch and that line of country. 

I’m a mother! kind of guy, but then you knew that.

You know what mother! is? It’s the new L’Age d’Or. Luis Bunuel‘s 1930 surrealist film, which opened on 11.29.30 at Studio 28 in Montmartre, also got a kind of F grade from conservative audiences of the day. It was attacked, spat upon, banned and withdrawn from circulation. It too was regarded as too arty or too perverse. All to say that Aronofsky and Lawrence are in good company, and that they should be proud for having made — no exaggeration — a disruptive, socially reflective masterpiece.