You can call Town and Country (New Line, 4.27.01) an unsatisfying film. A lot of people did actually. But I’ve always thought it’s a better-than-half-decent comedy, and that some scenes are hilarious. It’s certainly a lot better than was indicated by that 13% Rotten Tomatoes rating. True, it’s still one of the biggest bombs of the 21st Century. Having cost $90 million to make, it earned $6,719,973 domestically and $10.4 million worldwide. But the scene below (Warren Beatty being asked about possible infidelity by Diane Keaton, et. al.) really works. Funny, well-written, a nice pivot, etc. You know what also works? Those two scenes between Beatty, Andie McDowell and Charlton Heston (“Rowwwrrr”).

After the jump: Beatty’s recollection about the sound mixing of Bonnie and Clyde, from George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey.

Originally posted on 8.3.12: I had a reservation to stay tonight at Monument Valley’s Firetree Inn, a b & b located in a wifi dead zone about a half-hour’s drive from Goulding’s. The novelty is that visitors sleep in a Navajo Hogan, a kind of dirt igloo that Navajos have been crashing, praying and meditating in over the generations. It’s a sacred thing so the owner-managers want people who “get” the Hogan experience to stay there — they don’t want trashy, fast-food-eating families with loud kids looking to watch American Idol on flatscreens.

I get that. I wanted to do this. I figured I could do without wifi for an eight-hour period. But I’d never seen a real Hogan up close (to me the word “Hogan” means Hogan’s Heroes) and was curious about the Firetree, so early yesterday afternoon a friend and I drove out to pay a visit.

The owner-managers, a couple in their early 40s or late 30s, were — I don’t want to exaggerate — stunned by our visit. Stunned. They pretty much went into apoplectic shock. Their basic response was “whoa, wait a minute…what are you, a person who’s not scheduled to be here until late tomorrow afternoon, doing here now?” They couldn’t wrap their heads around someone just checking the place out, all friendly and no biggie.

The first thing the bald and bleary-eyed guy said was that “we don’t open for guests until 5 pm.” Nice people skills, pal. And then the woman said they’d recently gotten up — it was around 1 pm — and they were having breakfast. Right away I was thinking, “What’s up with these guys? Who treats customers like tax collectors? Who has breakfast at 1 pm?” When I said we’d just driven over from Goulding’s and just wanted to look around, the woman said, “But that’s so far.” No, I said — it’s about a 25-minute drive. (Which it is.)

Then they went into a kind of silent mode. “How do we deal with these people?,” they seemed to be saying. “How do we cope with this?”

It was nearly three years ago (1.9.14) when I tried to explain one of the most important rules for famous guys attending public events, which is to never wear orthopedic old-man shoes. I was derided for saying this, of course, but you can’t explain this aesthetic to deplorable-shoe types. Either you get the importance of wearing elegant shoes in public or you don’t. Wear your grandpa shoes all you want when you’re at home or shuffling around the mall, but never in front of the paying public.

I’m mentioning this again because a certain famous guy was recently photographed in a pair of black senior-citizen sneakers during a post-screening q & a. People in the audience listened to him discuss this and that, I’m sure, but they also had a good 30 to 40 minutes to just sit there and contemplate those ugly-ass shoes. Those people will never forget this.

My original point was that all self-respecting actors, celebrities and X-factor types need to tough it out and wear cool Italian shoes for lah-lah events, no matter what.

I’ve walked around the streets of Rome, Milan, Venice, Sienna and Florence on warm evenings, and white-haired Italian guys never, ever wear comfort shoes. They would rather be stricken with a heart attack and collapse on the street than wear those clunky things. When you’re hanging with the swells you have to look classy and elegant, even if it hurts. Even if it shortens your life.

You can laugh but a man’s choice of footwear usually says a lot about him, particularly about how he sees himself. Once the public realizes that you’re more into comfort clunkers than looking good, it’s the beginning of the end.

The mighty campaign of Hillary Clinton is going to barely squeak to a victory next Tuesday (Nate Silver says she has a 64% likelihood of winning vs. 36% for Donald Trump). But Florida is currently tipping in Trump’s favor, 52.9% to 47.1%, and so is North Carolina, 52.1% to 47.9% for Trump. N.Y. Times pollster Nate Cohn says the same thing — a close race but with Clinton slightly ahead.

Over the last two or three days journos have received invites to almost every award-season film that hasn’t yet screened — Denzel Washington‘s Fences, Ben Affleck‘s Live by Night, Stephen Gaghan‘s Gold, Robert Zemeckis‘s Allied, Theodore Melfi‘s Hidden Figures, Taylor Hackford‘s The Comedian, Juan Antonio Bayona‘s A Monster Calls. (Invites to the Bayona actually came in a bit earlier.) All of these will be seen before 11.17, which is convenient given that Hollywood Elsewhere leaves that day for the Key West Film Festival. The only logistical hang-up is the closing-night screening of Peter Berg‘s Patriot’s Day — maybe CBS Films will allow some of us see it a little early. Right now the only December hold-outs are Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (which, I’m guessing, will probably screen right before Thanksgiving — 11.21 or 11.22), John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder and Morten Tyldum‘s Passengers.

The Bleecker Street guys will soon host a couple of events (a party, a luncheon) for Matt Ross‘s Captain Fantastic, which everyone spoke highly of when it opened on 7.8.16. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 1.23.16, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and then opened theatrically a few weeks later. I didn’t review it until late July:

“This is one of the most complex and provocative dramas about parenting and passed-along values that I’ve seen in a dog’s age. I didn’t love it, partly because it unfolds in such an exotic and woolly realm (I don’t hold with killing deer or living without deodorant or applications of Aqua Velva) and partly because the last 10 or 12 minutes seem more fanciful than grounded, but I admired it. I certainly found it intriguing. It warrrants a thumbs-up.

Ross’s fascinating scheme is to acquaint us with an unorthodox good guy like Viggo Mortensen‘s Ben Cash — a brilliant, willful, Noam Chomsky-worshipping father of six, an Allie Fox type who’s highly independent, disciplined and obstinate. And then show us that he can also be a selfish prick and even a tyrant. But one who also has the decency to recognize his faults and the humility to pull back when life has told him to do so. But he’s still bull-headed. But he cares. He even shaves his beard off at the end.

With his wife in failing health, Ben and his six kids — three older teens named Bodevan (George MacKay), Kielry (Samantha Isler) and Vespyr (Annalise Basso), the tweener-aged Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) and Zaja (Shree Crooks) and a little towhead named Nai (Charlie Shotwell) — have been living for ten years like survivalists in a Pacific Northwest forest, hand-to-mouthing it like Swiss Family Robinson, killing game and growing vegetables while immersing themselves in martial-arts training, Esperanto lessons and campfire sing-alongs.

Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three (’61), one of my all-time favorite comfort films, has disappeared from Amazon streaming. Fans were never permitted to purchase a streaming copy — only rent one. But now that’s over. Which means, I presume, that a Bluray will hit the market sometime before long. But there’s no news of one. I love watching this 1961 film late at night, starting around 10:30 or 11 pm. Relaxing, soothing, like a glass of warm milk.

I don’t have issues with Christianity. I have issues with right-wing hinterland Christians, and particularly those who haven’t the backbone to oppose Donald Trump. The Romans may not have thrown Christians to the lions in ancient times (as famously depicted in Cecil B. DeMille‘s Sign of the Cross and Chester Erskine‘s Androcles and the Lion) and if they did do this it was terribly wrong. People should be free to worship freely, and having your throat torn open by a lion with bad breath is a ghastly way to die. That said, I understand why the Romans were so motivated.

I always liked Bill Simmons as a columnist, especially when he deigned to talk about movies and cultural matters. As a writer he has a relaxed guy vibe, a certain swagger and authority, but I never watched Any Given Wednesday more than once or twice because Simmons doesn’t exude that swagger thing on camera. My impression, in fact, was that his default thing was to be too much on the mild side. A grinning, laid-back, non-confrontational kiss-ass approach. Simmons is obviously a smart fellow but his voice is a little too high pitched. That on top of his slip-on sneakers (he should’ve worn cowboy boots or brown suede Bruno Maglis), those too-narrow shoulders, those flannel shirts and his glistening, close-cropped silver hair….later. One look at those grayish-blue eyes and you knew butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And now HBO has pulled the plug on Any Given Wednesday because of shitty ratings. The last episode will air on Wednesday, 11.9.

Spencer Ackerman‘s 11.3 Guardian story about the FBI having more or less become a pro-Trump rogue operation committed to sabotaging Hillary Clinton with misleading innuendo and bad smoke (“The FBI Is Trumpland”) was an eye-opener.

Hillary has one option when she takes office in January — all the bad FBI eggs have to be either fired or demoted and sent to regional offices in Bumblefuck territories. They’re finished. Tear off their stripes, break their sabres in two. And FBI director James Comey has to be axed also.

“Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election,” Ackerman’s story reads.

“Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“‘The FBI is Trumpland,’ said one current agent.

“This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

“The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” The agent called the bureau ‘Trumplandia’ with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.”