Every frame of Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night (Warner Bros., 12.25) looks immaculate and painterly and damn near perfect, which means that no matter how good the film turns out to be, Affleck owes a huge debt of gratitude to legendary cinematographer Robert Richardson (Shine a Light, Inglourious Basterds, Shutter Island, Django Unchained, World War Z, The Hateful Eight). Dying to see this, but I’ll be forced to miss Wednesday night’s big press screening due to my Key West excursion beginning early Wednesday morning. That’s okay — I’ll catch it the following week.

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I’ve been in a state of quiet, suppressed worry over Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (20th Century Fox, 11.23) for nearly four weeks. As noted I’ve been chatting enjoyably with Beatty for a quarter-century and I feel real affection for the guy (and I always will), but I can’t wiggle around the fact that while the movie is certainly its own bird and reps a strong vision, it’s mainly a spotty, in-and-out thing.

I recognize that several critics are fans and I’m happy for that, and I’ve heard it’s definitely popular among certain Academy types — cool. I hope Rules does well commercially and that Warren lands a Best Actor nomination for his trouble, although I think he and his strategists should have gone for a Best Supporting Actor nom instead. Just my opinion.

(l. to r.) Lilly Collins, Alden Ehrenreich and Warren Beatty on the red carpet at Thursday’s AFI Fest premiere of Rules Don’t Apply.

Beatty has been telling everyone that Rules Don’t Apply isn’t a Howard Hughes biopic, and that it’s primarily a love story between a pair of 20something Hughes employees — Marla Mabrey, a virginal would-be actress played by Lily Collins, and Frank Forbes, a driver-assistant played by Alden Ehrenreich — who want each other but feel constrained by the sexual puritanism of the ’50s. But the film is a Howard Hughes film, no question, and Beatty’s performance as the eccentric billionaire is by far the strongest element.

You come away thinking about Beatty’s performance — he’s got the charisma, conviction, weirdness, authority — but hardly at all about Collins or Ehrenreich’s, due to their characters feeling thin and under-written and muffled. And while the movie feels like it’s using the conventions of farce to keep things peppy and funny, at the same time it seems a little afraid of playing it straight and plain. 

But Rules is engaging here and there and at times even approaches a kind of brilliance by way of a klutzy, off-center mentality. Which is to say…I don’t know how to put it. I’m scratching my head as I write this.

Rules Don’t Apply isn’t so much a “dramedy” as an arch, dialed-down farce that feels inspired here and there and at other times like a movie that never really takes flight. It’s a mix of conflicted and conflicting impulses and cross purposes, and yet is all of a curious piece. I saw it for a second time two nights ago, and I’m afraid I felt the same as I did after the first viewing in mid-October, which was “hmmm….in and out, not bad here and there, Warren is good, maybe Academy members will like it, crazy movie, some good scenes,” etc.

It feels turgid and constricted in some ways, and yet has a silly, loose and fuck-all tone at other times. A bent, tightly-sprung attitude. 

It’s been edited like a sonuvabitch — cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Many scenes during the first 25% or one-third feel a bit choppy and abbreviated. Yes, that’s the way farces are usually paced. It reminded me at times of Ernst Lubitsch‘s Design for Living (that’s good) and at other times like Charlie Chaplin‘s The Countess From Hong Kong (don’t ask). And yes, I recognize that it’s personal to some degree in that Warren came from a somewhat repressed religious culture in the ’50s.

From a 2.10.15 N.Y. Times “Insider” piece: “On 11.21.22, The New York Times gave its readers their first glimpse of Adolf Hitler, in a profile that got a lot of things right — its description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup, presaged his unsuccessful beer hall putsch less than a year later. But the article also got one crucial point very wrong — despite what ‘several reliable, well-informed sources’ told The Times, his anti-Semitism was every bit as genuine and violent as it sounded.”

Before The Flood director Fisher Stevens to Hollywood Elsewhere during yesterday’s phone interview: “You’re right — the election was the worst possible thing that could have happened for the environmental movement. But I don’t want to be on one of those people who says ‘fuck this’ and rolls over and gives up. I’m going to do my best to get to Trump and try to make him understand that everything he does politically or strategically can probably be changed, but everything he does to the environment cannot be changed. (Here’s the mp3.)

“His daughter Ivanka, whom I know and can get to…she seems a bit sensible…our kids were born the same day in the same hospital. I’m going to implore her to tell her father to oppose government corruption, to make a stand. Most of the climate deniers are on the payroll of lobbyists. I know it’s a long shot, but it’s the only think I can think of to keep myself from going into a big black hole. We have access to her, and we’re going to try to sit down with her and try to influence her before Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell and others….what worries me most is not Trump but the people he’s surrounding himself with.

“Leo is really depressed [about the election], but he’ll join me in this [strategy]. There’s a lot of passion. We’re not going to give up. We’re gonna keep fighting. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg can hold on for another four years…” Again, the mp3. Watch Before The Flood for $2.99.

We all have a basic instinct in our genes to show obeisance before power. Once the big gorilla has beaten his chest with sufficient fervor and shown territorial dominance, something deep-rooted compels lesser primates to go “hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo” and bow down when he passes. I for one have always resisted this for the most part. Bill Maher exhibited no monkey submission last night, and neither did John Legend when he came on the show at the halfway mark. Sad to say, Oprah Winfrey did the other day. “To hear President Obama say that he has renewed confidence in the peaceful transition, I think everybody can take a deep breath,” she said. “Hope is still alive.” Oprah has always been a kowtower. Thankfully tens of millions of others are made of sterner stuff.

From “Things Not Said,” posted during Cannes Film Festival on 5.21.16: “Emad, a 30something Tehran school teacher (Shahab Hosseini), is playing Willy Loman in a stage production of Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman, and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is playing Linda, Willy’s wife. An intriguing endeavor but the play, we soon learn, isn’t central to their story.

“Forced by structural problems to vacate their apartment building, the couple has moved into another place, a bit raggedy but reasonably spacious, that a friend has referred them to. The wrinkle is that it was recently vacated by a prostitute or, as locals describe her, ‘a woman with many male companions.’ But things are otherwise okay. Emad and Rana are happy (they’re thinking about having a child), Emad enjoys his teaching job, the play is selling tickets, etc.

“One day while Emad is out and Rana is about to take a shower, the front-door alarm sounds and Rana, presuming it’s Emad, pushes the buzzer. But it’s someone else — a client of the prostitute. We’re not shown what happens next, but Emad returns to signs of a struggle and blood stains on the floor. Rana has been taken to a hospital, he’s told. She’s okay but has suffered a head wound that requires stitches. She’s been assaulted but not raped.

“The attack is bad enough, but from Eman’s perspective there’s another problem. Rana, traumatized and emotionally numb, is reluctant to share details about what precisely happened. At first she says she didn’t see her attacker’s face, but later she indicates that she did catch a glimpse. And then Emad finds someone’s cell phone and a set of keys in the apartment, and also a wad of cash. On top of which a pickup truck, apparently belonging to the attacker, is parked outside, and the keys Eman has found fit the door lock and the ignition.

And by the way, where has Bill Maher been since Tuesday night? He’s been flatlining, a Twitter ghost. Well, his final Real Time with Bill Maher show of the season will be livestreamed on the program’s YouTube channel tonight. Both the livestream and the HBO airing will begin at 10 pm eastern. Tonight’s episode will also be available on YouTube after the livestream. Tonight’s guests are Former Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, comedian Trae Crowder, former Obama guy David Axelrod, “Wonkette” founder Ana Marie Cox and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Hollywood Elsewhere wil definitely attend tomorrow morning’s anti-Trump protest in MacArthur Park, which will start around 10 am. True, I haven’t attended any of the nocturnal downtown protests because of screenings of award-season films. Last night I attended the AFI premiere screening of Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply, and the previous night — Wednesday, 11.9 — I caught Robert Zemeckis‘s Allied. But whaddaya want from me? This stuff is my bread and butter.

But what’s even more important than MacArthur Park will be attending a planned anti-Trump rally in Washington D.C., on Friday. 1.20.17. This is major. Liberals can’t just sit on their couches and let the Trump administration take power and in all likelihood decimate the environment, Obamacare and God knows what else without incident.

This has to be the new Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert humanist rally. It has to be huge. Remember that thing they organized in D.C. in October 2010? We need 100,000 people on the streets in D.C. that day. Hell, make it 200K. And I don’t mean people congregating like mellow, smiling sheep but protestors ready to shout and cause trouble and even go to jail if need be.

What’s about to happen to this country is too catastrophic to just shrug off. I’m actually considering missing the first full day of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival in order to attend this. Think of your children, think of history, think of what just happened three days ago. This is not an HBO miniseries that people are strongly complaining about on Twitter. This is real. This is Hannibal at the gates.

In a just-posted interview with his grandson Dylan, Robert Redford has said he’ll more or less retire after finishing what he says will be his final two films — Our Souls at Night, a love story for older people who get a second chance in life, costarring himself and Jane Fonda, and Old Man with a Gun, “a lighter piece” with himself, Casey Affleck and Sissy Spacek.

The reason I’ve said “more or less retire” is that Redford said he’s thinking of going back to sketching and directing “and not acting so much.” The words “so much” indicate a degree of flexibility.

Robert Redford in Rome sometime around 1957 or thereabouts, or possibly in ’56.

“I’m getting tired of acting,” he told his grandson. “I’m an impatient person, so it’s hard for me to sit around and do take after take after take. At this point in my life, age 80, it’d give me more satisfaction because I’m not dependent on anybody. It’s just me, just the way it used to be, and so going back to sketching — that’s sort of where my head is right now. So I’m thinking of moving in that direction and not acting so much. Once [the two films are] done I’m going to say, ‘Okay, that’s goodbye to all that’ and then just focus on directing.”

During the q & a Redford tells Dylan about sleeping one night on the beach in Cannes when he was hitchhiking between Paris and Florence in ’57 or thereabouts, and at one point looking up at the “Carlisle” hotel and wondering what it would be liked to stay there and drink champagne, etc. I posted the following in the comment thread: “Yo, Dylan — are you and your grandad sure that hotel in Cannes was called the ‘Carlisle’? There’s no record of a ‘Carlisle’ hotel in Cannes, nor one spelled ‘Carlyle’ like the famous hotel in NYC. Are you sure your grandad wasn’t referring to the Hotel Carlton? You might want to double-check.”

What a sad irony that Robert Vaughn, an ardent lifelong liberal Democrat, has died with the knowledge that Orange Hitler will move into the White House on 1.20.17. Perhaps last Tuesday’s election hastened his end, and perhaps not. But if I’d been in Robert Vaughn‘s slippers and ill and near the end, I would have probably said “oh, my God, this is ludicrous…I’m outta here.”

Vaughn was 83, and if you ask me his strongest performance was conniving San Francisco politician Walter Chalmers in Peter Yates‘ Bullitt (’68) — the bane of Steve McQueen‘s existence. In the annals of movie villains, all hail the sinister, calculating, rodent-like Walter Chalmers!

He also played David Blackman, a fetishy studio-boss character who liked to wear bras and garter belts during sex, in Blake Edwards‘ S.O.B. (’81). Every character in S.O.B. was allegedly based on a real person to some degree, and I’m told that Blackman was allegedly based on Johnny Carson, or more particularly an observation passed along by Morgan Fairchild (who was Carson’s lover in ’80 or thereabouts) that Carson enjoyed this, etc. Yes, it sounds ludicrous, grain of salt, etc.

The Wiki page says Vaughn played two roles in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments — a Hebrew golden calf paganist and an Egyptian charioteer (i.e., he allegedly stood right behind Yul Brynner‘s Ramses in the campaign against Moses’ flock). Three…actually four years later he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as a drunken, self-destructive scion in The Young Philadelphians (’59). He also played the most neurotic of the gunmen in The Magnificent Seven (’60).

Yes, Vaughn’s biggest, splashiest role was Napoleon Solo in the original ’60s series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. He also played Harry Rule in The Protectors, a ’70s TV series that I never saw or cared about in the slightest, and then General Hunt Stockwell in the 5th season of The A-Team — ditto. He also has a six-year, 48-episode run (’04 to ’12) on the British TV series Hustle, and in’12 appeared in a British soap called Coronation Street.

I used to work for a New Canaan landscaping outfit in the mid ’70s, and the boss, Big John Calitri, used to subconsciously mutter pop labels and phrases as a kind of work mantra. One of his favorites was “Molson’s Golden Ale.” We’d be lugging bags of fertilizer and wood chips or planting balled saplings, and between exhausted grunts Big John would say “Molson’s Golden Ale.” Then his son started to do it, and of his favorites was “Walter Chalmers.” It became a running joke between he, myself and one other guy on the crew. Whenever we were especially tired or facing an especially hard task, someone would say “Walter Chalmers.”

I’m not certain this is Robert Vaughn in the chariot behind Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, but…well, it might be.

Everybody knows Cohen was ailing / Everybody knows Cohen has died / Everybody got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just sighed / Everybody talking to their pockets / Everybody wants a box of chocolates / And a long stem rose / Everybody knows