The beginning of the end for Steve Bannon? The neutral view is to call his removal from the National Security Council a strategic shift within the Trump White House, but if Bannon had any pride he’d quit today and go back to Breitbart.

Farley Granger didn’t come out until he was 70 or thereabouts, after discussing his homosexuality in The Celluloid Closet (’95). Tab Hunter half came out when he made John Waters‘ Polyester and Lust in the Dust, but not officially until ’05, at age 74, in a co-authored autobiography, “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.” Richard Chamberlain was outed at age 55 but didn’t come out until ’03 (when he was nearly 70) in his autobiography “Shattered Love“. Liberace, who died at age 67 from AIDS, might have come out if he’d lived into his 70s. Have there ever been any Barry Manilow fans who weren’t completely aware of his orientation going back to the late ’70s if not earlier, and yet he never came out until just now, at age 73. Deep-cave lifestyles are a generational thing for guys reared in heavily closeted times.

Recent e-mail from critic friend: Walter Hill‘s The Assignment (Saban, 4.7) is a real grindhouse sleeper. It deserves to find an audience. I know it’s taking heat from the LBGTQ community for ‘exploiting’ the issue of gender reassignment surgery etc. But I don’t recall the same complaints when Pedro Almodovar covered more or less the same territory, brilliantly and even more luridly, in The Skin I Live In. Michelle Rodriguez is terrific as the male gangland assassin transformed into a woman by Sigourney Weaver‘s mad scientist (Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Moreau) in full-throated Hannibal Lecter mode. It’s much better than anyone except for Todd McCarthy and a few others have let on.”

Posted on 9.17.16 from Toronto: “I just saw it, and it’s nowhere near as problematic as I’d been led to expect. Pulpy and crude, yes, but fairly intelligent, a little slow but far from ludicrous, and generally not bad. It’s way, way better than either of the Sin City flicks. Michelle Rodriguez with a beard looks like Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis. I suspect that those time & place title cards along with those animated freeze-frames were tacked on in post. It also seems as if those Tony Shalhoub-interviews-Sigourney Weaver exposition scenes might have been shot after principal photography. I’ve already mentioned that the plot bears a certain similarity to Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In. If Sam Fuller was still around he could’ve made something like this.”

The President Show (Comedy Central) kicks off on 4.27. Anthony Atamanuik does an excellent Trump, but Trump himself “does” Donald Trump. He’s his own parody. And how do you pronounce Atamanuik? (Like “automatic” without the “t” and ignoring the “u”, I’m presuming.) If I’d been in Atamanuik’s shoes I would have changed my last name to “Atomic” or “Adverse.” There are many, many people out there who don’t know who the late Vaughn Meader was. The poor guy’s bigtime career lasted a year and a half, from the spring ’62 release of “The First Family” to 11.22.63.

From Meader’s Wiki page: “According to several sources, Lenny Bruce went on with his 11.22.63 nightclub show as scheduled. Just hours after Kennedy’s death, Bruce walked onstage, stood silently for several moments, then said sadly, ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The joke proved true. Meader discovered that he was so completely typecast as a Kennedy impersonator that he could not find anyone willing to hire him for any of his other talents.”

I used to get stomach aches when I was seven or eight. I would eat too much of my grandmother’s cornbread and wind up groaning in my bed at 2 am or even throwing up. I haven’t suffered a stomach ache since. Occasional fevers but never any need for Maalox, Pepto Bismol, Ranitidine. Until last night, I should say. Today was worse. It felt like a hot copper coil was sitting in my stomach. My first thought was a possible ulcer, but don’t ulcers manifest gradually? Then I thought it might be stomach cancer, but that seemed overly dramatic. All I know is that I’ve felt weak all day (napped once) and barely able to write. As I noted 15 or 16 months ago, I don’t “do” illnesses as a rule. 10:30 pm update: Three or four hours ago “the pain stopped,” like Mia Farrow said in Rosemary’s Baby. I’m out of the woods.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported earlier today that Catherine Hardwicke may direct a Sony-financed remake of Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, which I went nuts over when I saw it at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Gina Rodriguez (the CW’s Jane The Virgin) will play the beauty contestant (Stephanie Sigman in Naranjo’s version) who gets dragged into the grotesque intrigues of a Mexican drug gang.

One, why did Hardwicke and Hollywood wait for six years to remake this thing? If a foreign film is adaptable for the U.S. market, producers knows this within days of its first festival screening and are usually all over it, and Miss Bala was highly praised, nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature. Two, Hardwicke is probably going to make it into something fairly different from Naranjo’s drug-dealer melodrama, which basically played like an early ’60s Michelangelo Antonioni film. And three, the Antonioni treatment is why Miss Bala felt like such a knockout. Remove the arthouse element and you just have a kidnapping action drama.

HE tweet from September 2011: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay and his acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cutting.”

Yesterday’s “Greatest Female Villains” post led me to this Fatal Attraction clip, and a realization of how unrealistic and miscalculated Michael Douglas‘s acting is in this scene.

Like any husband who’s indulged in an impulsive weekend affair Douglas would naturally be focused on keeping his wife, played by Anne Archer, in the dark. However angry he might be about finding Glenn Close chatting with her, not getting busted would be absolutely paramount. The normal way to handle this situation would be to play along, be polite, adopt a pleasant demeanor and not give Archer the slightest reason to suspect that something’s up.

But Douglas, performing under the direction of Adrien Lyne, plays it the stupid way. He’s rude and sullen, giving Close a death-ray look and saying as little as possible. In the real world Archer would spot in a second that Douglas and Close not only know each other but that some kind of bad business might have gone down.

Lyne didn’t care about that. He wanted Douglas to echo the same negative emotions that the audience was going through when they saw Close sitting with Archer, and to hell with anything else.

This, in a nutshell, is what mediocre directing and acting are all about. Ignoring recognizable human behavior and focusing on goosing the audience.

The latest HE header logo is the old logo with the photo switched out. I’m fine with this. Site re-designs are traumatic — people always recoil and complain and ask “what was wrong with the original?” — so it’s good to keep the same old thing at the top.

It’s funny, but I don’t think I want to present myself as the Anton Chigurh of Hollywood columnists. I relate a lot more to Josh Brolin‘s No Country For Old Men character. I certainly don’t want to project myself as some kind of fearsome cyclops. The idea is funny, but over and over again it might be a bit much. (This is just a rough idea of how the revised HE logo might look on a regular basis.)

The screenplay for Ingrid Goes West (Neon, 8.4) “adeptly sets the scene for some classic comedy of embarrassment and then sets things in motion smoothly,” says Hollywood Reporter critic Leslie Felperin. “But as whirlwinds are reaped and revelations tumble out, a not-in-a-good-way sourness emerges that makes the last act more unpleasant than perhaps the filmmakers intended.

“Although one wants to praise the screenplay for not spelling everything out, sometimes the characters’ motivations feel just a little too opaque and their decisions seem more motivated by plot mechanics than real human desires.

“On the other hand, that may be exactly the point, and the film might be read as a gloss on how shallow, whimsical and aimless these sort of people are. Certainly, hummingbird-fast editing, courtesy of Jack Price, makes the montages of emojis, hashtags and filtered phone-shot snapshots feel just as hyperactive and dizzying as one would expect, and like social media itself, the final effect is both weirdly entrancing and cloying.”

Last evening the SRO and I were heading east on Montana Avenue when I noticed that a new 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing at the Aero. It was 7:10 pm, or 20 minutes before the show would begin. I excitedly talked her into catching this 1968 classic, as she’d never seen it. So we bought our tickets, got our refreshments, sat down in the third row…and the film looked like dogshit.

Dark, muddy, no focus or sharpness to speak of, all of those exquisite values covered in shadow — a complete rip-off of the patrons who paid $15 a pop.

They were presumably showing the same freshly created 70mm print that’s been playing at the American Cinematheque Egyptian in Hollywood, which means that it probably looked like shit there also. It’s an absolute scandal that that no one’s said anything. All of these 2001 fans, paying crowd after paying crowd, watching one of the inkiest, most under-lighted prints I’ve ever seen, and they’ve all just sat there like sheep.

I went into the lobby and told the staff that the print, or at the very least the projection, was bullshit. “My 2001 Bluray looks glorious on my 65″ Sony 4K, but what you’re showing doesn’t look anywhere near as good,” I said. They reacted like cigar-store Indians. Shocked, fearful.

The manager appeared. “Have you ever seen the 2001 Bluray on a decent high-def screen?” I asked him. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, the Bluray is how it should look — what you’re showing looks like shit.” Manager: “You can’t expect a 70mm print to look like a Bluray…it’s a different thing. It’s celluloid.” Me: “Oh, yeah? I saw a clean 70mm 2001 print at the old Plitt twinplex in Century City back in the mid ’80s, and it looked beautiful. Your print looks like crap.” Manager: “You’re the first person to say anything like this.” Me: “Oh, well, that changes everything! Nobody else complained, you say? That must mean I’m full of shit then!”