During the chilly months you’ll occasionally daydream about the languid comforts of hot summer afternoons, but when they actually arrive you never seem to savor them. Mostly because you’re avoiding the heat in some air-conditioned space, at home or more often in a car and at the same time thinking “I can’t say I’m actually enjoying this…it would be nicer to be slightly sweating outside somewhere.”

We drove up to sun-baked Goleta yesterday afternoon, and most of the time I was trying — struggling — to suppress hostile thoughts about other drivers. The wisest approach to freeway driving is to blend in and go with the flow. Don’t drive faster than your fellows and make an extra-special point of not driving slower. For three-plus hours I was grappling with God knows how many drivers who couldn’t have cared less about this simple rule of civilized behavior. Especially those who couldn’t seem to understand that if they wanted to drive slower they needed to pull into the right lane. More considerate that way, but in the minds of too many it didn’t register. Hell is other people.

It’s not a great idea to meditate too heavily upon basic “where is my life heading?” stuff if you happen to be up at 4:30 am, as I was a little while ago. I tried to concentrate on my usual pre-dawn iPhone surfing ritual, searching for stories or topics or bounce-offs that might be worth a comment or argument of some kind. But that old, regrettably familiar Ingmar Bergman-like sense of impending doom kept creeping in. It’s best not to dwell in this realm. Gloom thoughts always go away when the morning light appears. But that vague sense of big black wolves sitting outside your door at 5:10 am…whoa. Why am I even sharing this? I can’t even remember if I’ve seen Hour of the Wolf, which probably means I haven’t. But I guess I don’t need to, right?

I can only hope that after I’m toast someone eulogizes me with an opening graph as good as this one. Hats off to Daniel Stern, whom I ran into once in Keith Szarabajka and Julie Donald‘s sprawling basement pad.

Shame on Variety and deputy editor Pat Saperstein for describing the late and great John Heard, who yesterday was found dead in a Palo Alto hotel room, as the “Home Alone dad.” Great merciful bloodstained gods! Why would Variety do such a thing to an actor of Heard’s calibre? This is like an obit headline writer calling James Stewart “the singing Magic of Lassie guy.”

Yes, Heard played Macaulay Culkin‘s dad in the hugely popular Home Alone (’90) and in the ’92 sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, but show a little decency, for God’s sake. Heard was glad to have starred in these films, but he did it for the money.

Heard should more properly be remembered and honored for his late ’70s to early ’80s hot streak of fierce, penetrating performances in Between The Lines, On the Yard, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Heart Beat (in which he played Jack Kerouac to Nick Nolte‘s Neal Casady), Ivan Passer‘s Cutter’s Way and Paul Schrader‘s Cat People, the only film in which Heard played a romantic lead.

And don’t forget his wonderful work on The Sopranos as that sad, corrupt, dessicated detective who was on Tony Soprano’s payroll and half-hated himself for that.

Heard downshifted into character roles after Cat People, but he scored in CHUD, Best Revenge, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, The Trip to Bountiful and Robert Redford‘s The Milagro Beanfield War.

In the spring of ’83 I saw Heard knock it hard and straight in Total Abandon, a courthouse stage drama written by Larry Atlas. Or so I recall. I certainly remember going up to Heard after the matinee ended and saying “Wow, man…that’s a tough role to play twice a day” and him smiling and shrugging and saying “naaah, just a workout.”

I’m pretty sure I also saw Heard act in G.R. Point, an anti-war play set in Vietnam, but I need to sift through my memory leaves a bit more.

In his 7.17 review of Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, USA Today‘s Brian Truitt mentioned with a straight face that the absence of black or brown actors may constitute a perception problem in some quarters. He actually said this. Literal quote: “The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the oppression of 21st Century political correctness laid bare on the table.

There’s been a reaction to this on Facebook, followed by a reaction to this reaction. Last night Forbes critic Scott Mendelsohn wrote, “You folks are really going to give USA Today critic crap over a half-a-sentence note that Dunkirk is indeed a white dude sausage fest (accurate) in an otherwise uber-positive 3.5-star review? This is why I don’t write hot takes anymore, because I can’t bear to be associated with such reactionary crap.”

A “white dude sausage fest”? To the best of my knowledge 1940s England was pretty much an all-white country, at least as far as its troops were concerned, but depicting this social reality in a 2017 film will draw sporadic catcalls.

Mendelsohn’s comment drew a reply from Facebook poster Zachary Sosland, to wit: “I’m not upset with the review as much as I am with the potential message that movies should sacrifice historical accuracy for political correctness.”

I’ve mentioned this 16 or 17 times, but never forget that Joe and Jane Popcorn will often embrace formulaic, insubstantial or otherwise easy-lay mediocrities that don’t tend to stand the test of time. Not entirely, of course, but frequently enough. And that they often tend to snub, under-appreciate or otherwise shrug their shoulders when exceptional, ahead-of-the-curve films come along. Keep in mind also that the ones who tend to spot and celebrate the really good stuff are critics and cultists and, to a lesser extent, awards-giving orgs like the Academy. It sounds self-justifying but it’s largely true. Joe and Jane see what they want to see, but they’ll never be paragons of seasoned taste and wise judgment, certainly not on any consistent basis.

I brought this up a little more than 13 years ago, and at the time I was reeling over the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and needed to pat myself on the back for despising that film down to the core of my soul. “What does it say about a society that celebrates a film as bad as this?,” I asked. I’ve always maintained that the most popular films of any year always amount to a kind of portrait of where Joe and Jane are at deep down…a reflection of their inner psyche, what they’re longing for, how they’d like to see themselves in some way.

With the exception of Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, They Won’t Forget and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, no one today ever talks about the films directed by Mervyn LeRoy, particularly his hot-streak pics of the ’50s — Quo Vadis, Million Dollar Mermaid, Mr. Roberts, The FBI Story, No Time for Sergeants. (Or his almost as popular films of the early ’60s — The Devil at 4 O’Clock, A Majority of One, Gypsy and Mary, Mary.) LeRoy’s ’50s films were big deals in their day, but who talks about them now with serious affection or respect? I’ve said this 16 times also, but in some respects LeRoy was the Steven Spielberg of his day.

Remember that The Wizard of Oz (produced by LeRoy) wasn’t hugely popular with Joe Schmoe types in 1939, and that a year earlier Bringing Up Baby was also a box-office shortfaller. I’ve never seen Welcome Stranger, a Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald heart-warmer that was 1947’s #1 box-office hit. Who outside of Twilight Time fanatics has ever seen The Egyptian**, one of the big box-office hits of 1954? (20th Century Fox wanted Marlon Brando to star in it and he refused, resulting in a big brouhaha.) Samson and Delilah was 1950’s biggest hit, David and Bathsheba was 1951’s top-grosser, and The Ten Commandments ruled the box-office in 1957 (even though it premiered on 10.5.56), and none of them play very well by today’s aesthetic standards. And Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo, arguably his best film and an undisputed classic in any realm, flopped when it opened in 1958.

** Twilight Time’s Bluray of The Egyptian is currently selling for $249 on Amazon.

“In addition, Ben Affleck will turn 45 in August, so he would be pushing 50 before Matt Reeves‘ The Batman arrives in theaters. If Reeves makes a trilogy, Affleck would be in his mid 50s at best by the time that’s done. Maybe Tom Cruise could pull that off, but Affleck’s body hasn’t exactly been a temple.” — from “Ben Affleck’s Batman Future in Doubt as Warner Bros. Plots Franchise,” posted on 7.21 by Hollywood Reporter columnist Kim Masters, just after 10 am.

From “We’ll Miss You, Sean Spicer,” a 7.21 N.Y. Times opinion piece by Erin Gloria Ryan: “Reports indicate that Sean Spicer quit because President Trump had appointed Anthony Scaramucci White House communications director. After all that’s happened in the last six months, for Mr. Spicer, The Mooch was a bridge too far.

“The door slam was more befitting a moody teenager than the man whose job it is to communicate, but it was the perfect, flouncing end to Mr. Spicer’s tenure. How else could a six-month run of lying, whining and whining about being asked about lying end? All that was missing was a shrieked ‘I hate you!'”

In a 7.21 Vulture article called “Why I Wrote Detroit,” screenwriter-producer Mark Boal explains his saga of research and assembly in plain, straight prose.

Before proceeding the reader and prospective viewer of Detroit should understand that the film isn’t some intense panoramic sweep about the Detroit riots of ’67 but about the notorious Algiers Motel incident. A serious portion of the film takes place inside Manor House, a three-story brick building behind the motel where three black teenagers — Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard and Fred Temple — were killed by authorities.

Before reading Boal’s piece I somehow missed that Detroit will open in select cities on 7.28 before going wide on 8.4.

“I chose this story from the ’60s in part because the decade evokes such lively and contradictory associations,” Boal explains. “The summer of 1967 witnessed two of the worst civil disturbances in American history — first Newark, then Detroit. It is troubling even now to watch the news coverage of all that violence and destruction, but make no mistake about it — this was an uprising, a rebellion. This was black America lashing out against an entrenched culture of repression and bigotry.

“And yet the far more widely remembered (and celebrated) spectacle of rebellion from that same moment in time is of the Summer of Love, all those hippies, mostly white, joyfully grooving out in San Francisco. [Today] the love-potion stuff has run its course, diffused into little more than an advertising trope, but the events in Detroit are hard evidence of a cultural crisis that remains unresolved, of two Americas that still don’t know quite how to deal with each other.

“The underlying intention of Detroit was always…to unpack the riot and this one incident at the Algiers from the point of view of its many participants, and thereby enable the audience to experience the events themselves. We wanted viewers not so much to watch the story as absorb it like a physical sensation. This necessitated certain narrative devices, in order to slip the whole thing past the resistance viewers often have [in] allowing troubling feelings to get in.

Straight from Wikipedia, no comment or elaboration needed: “In a political sense, bread and circuses (or bread and games, from Latin phrase panem et circenses) alludes to a superficial means of appeasement. It alludes to the generating of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion and distraction, or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace, as an offered ‘palliative’.

“The term’s originator, the poet Juvenal, used the phrase to decry the selfishness of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase also implies the erosion or ignorance of civic duty amongst the commoners.

“Panem et circenses identifies the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which no longer cares for its historical birthright of political involvement. It alludes to Roman politicians having passed laws in 140 B.C. to retain the votes of poorer citizens by introducing a grain dole: giving out free wheat and entertainment, ‘bread and circuses’, became the most effective way to rise to power.”

Four months ago an HE tipster caught a research screening of George Clooney‘s Suburbicon at the Sherman Oaks Arclight, and passed along some comments. Now that there’s talk of this Fargo-esque ’50s noir comedy debuting in Venice six weeks hence, it can’t hurt to reconsider what was posted last March.

The tipster called Suburbicon Clooney’s “best-directed film ever…more bell-ringy than The Ides of March, Monuments Men, Good Night and Good Luck, Leatherheads and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The stars are Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac and young Noah Jupe. Paramount will open it on 10.27.

Suburbicon star Julianne Moore, director George Clooney during shooting last fall.

Joel and Ethan Coen‘s mid ’80s script was reworked by Clooney and Grant Heslov — the current Wikipedia page gives the Coens sole writing credit.

The other film Suburbicon resembles besides Fargo, the guy says, is Martin McDonagh‘s unreleased Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10).

I’ll skip over the plot particulars, but it involves deceit, murder and hired hitmen a la Fargo with a pinch or two of Double Indemnity. Speaking of that 1944 Billy Wilder film, Oscar Isaac, portraying an insurance investigator, has a great interrogation scene towards the end in the tradition of Edward G. Robinson‘s Barton Keyes character.

The trade rumble is that Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which appears to be more of a personal-scale Pan’s Labyrinth-type deal than anything he’s made since Pan’s Labyrinth, may be going to the Venice Film Festival. That’s good — gentle-souled Guillermo needed to step out of that realm of big-ass fanboy movies with big-ass, Comic Con-friendly production values.

I’ll admit that I was hoping that Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! would be included as a Venice/Telluride thing, even though that piece-of-my-heart JLaw poster strongly hinted that mother! is some kind of intense, high-style genre film, albeit possibly outside the box in this or that respect. Generally speaking films of this nature are rarely given a Venice/Telluride launch, although I wanted to see it happen for my own perverse reasons. The opening has been advanced from 10.13 to 9.15.

Martin McDonaugh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri may also debut in Venice, they’re saying. But as noted on 7.19, it may not stage its North American continent debut in Telluride but Toronto. The rural drama seems like a perfect Telluride thing + a nice stateside complement to a possible Venice launch, but maybe Toronto offered a big first-weekend gala. We’ll hear soon enough.

HE readers will recall that I posted a favorable research-screening response last March to George Clooney’s Suburbicon. If it’s indeed as fetching as the research-screening guy said it was, a slot at the Venice Film Festival would be in order. The two questions that follow, of course, are (a) will it go to Telluride also or (b) will Paramount be pulling a Fox Searchlight and giving it a possible Toronto debut?

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing was previously confirmed for Venice, which also means a likely Telluride launch.

I don’t know from Andrew Haigh‘s Lean On Pete, Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama or Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Mektoub Is Mektoub. Forget Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049 going to Venice or Tellruide — more likely Toronto. Our Souls At Night, the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda romantic reunion Netflix release, will be enjoying a “go easy” out-of-competition Venice debut.