How long have I been explaining that any would-be tentpole flick that includes a looking-down shot of the hero swan-diving off a tall building is automatically and irrevocably shit? And if you add shots of guys flying from building to building a la Crouching Tiger and/or jumping off a two-story building onto the street below the movie has dug itself into an even deeper hole. Justin Kurzel, director of Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21), went there anyway. Because…you tell me. Because he’s an animal? Add Michael Fassbender to the mix and you’re talking serious toxicity. Sidenote: Poor Jeremy Irons has been doing paycheck work since the mid ’90s. His first shameless-prostitute gig was playing the creepy villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance (’95). His great big-screen run lasted about 12 years — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.

I’m totally down with the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road monochrome version (Warner Home Video, 12.6) but I’d also buy a black-and-white Bluray version of The Road Warrior (’82) in a New York minute. Nor would I mind attending a screening of the black-and-white Fury Road in a decent-sized theatre, just to get the full impact. Update: It’s playing at Cinefamily on Tuesday, November 1st. I take it Warner Home Video will be releasing a black-and-white only version plus a Bluray with both the color and b & w versions together…right? Or am I confusing the Australian version with the domestic?

Last night Michael Moore announced a Tuesday, 10.18 debut of a secret Donald Trump documentary, Michael Moore in Trumpland, at Manhattan’s IFC Center. The torrent that has spewed out of Trump (particularly since he shifted into full-meltdown mode following the Access Hollywood pussy tape and all the sexual-assault accusations) doesn’t need a Moore spin, but I’d love to share in the revelry all the same. Remember that Moore was voicing serious concern about a Trump victory as recently as…what, last July? Variety is describing it as “a film version of [Moore’s] one-man show, which he has been performing in Ohio.” Presumably a Los Angeles screening is being arranged as we speak. I’d love to see it between now and Thursday night as I leave for Savannah on Friday morning.

The Guardian reported yesterday that the Swedish Academy has heard nothing but silence from Bob Dylan about whether or not he’ll be in Stockholm on 12.10.16 to accept his Nobel prize in literature. “I am not at all worried,” Academy secretary Sara Danius is quoted saying. “I think he will show up.” What Dylan is saying with his silence: “I do what I do and that’s enough. I don’t believe in awards or taking bows at high falutin’ ceremonies. Is this some kind of rare honor, a tribute of a lifetime? Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day expressing fuck-all indifference is more important to me than graciousness or good manners. I’ll probably show up but maybe I won’t. I don’t owe shit to anyone or anything. I’ve been a weird-prick motherfucker before and I might be again.” Leonard Cohen agrees after a fashion: “To me, [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”

Next Monday’s Academy screening + reception for Mel Gibson‘s Hacksaw Ridge (Lionsgate/Summit, 11.4) will be a kind of socially-ratifying ritual affirming the general presumption that Gibson is out of the doghouse. I’ll be at the Savannah Film Festival that night, so I’ve been given a chance to catch the World War II saga a bit earlier. Much obliged.

Lobby standee inside West Hollywood’s Grove plex, snapped last night (Monday, 10.17).

My only opportunity to see Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant pre-opening was last Wednesday’s Manhattan all-media screening. I blew that off in order to have dinner with Jett in a Bed-Stuy Mexican restaurant. So I saw it last night at the Grove. But within an hour I was ready to leave. Give me credit for sticking it out until the 90-minute mark.

I was moderately intrigued by the autistic assassin idea, but the film is only interested in using that concept to sell a same-old-malarkey action franchise about another lethal, emotionally remote action hero who eliminates bad guys like he’s channel-surfing or, you know, doing what comes naturally. Because he’s a brawny, stealthy, quietly charismatic killing machine of few words…zzzzzz.

Ben Affleck‘s Christian Wolff may be an emotionally remote math wiz, but he’s still Bruce Wayne mixed with John Wick plus (as noted by Atlantic critic Chris Orr) Christian Bale’s Michael Burry character in The Big Short. Who received martial arts training as a child from a robe-wearing, bald-headed Asian instructor…Jesus! That’s when I decided to leave early. If an action film attempting to launch a franchise (and that’s really the basic game here, an origin story that might launch three or four Christian Wolff flicks) can’t create a backstory without resorting to fucking martial-arts training at a formative age, I for one won’t participate.

On top of which I really couldn’t figure out some of the plot teasings, and I really didn’t want to make the effort. I paid money to see this thing and now I have to screw my brain down and work to figure it out? Fuck that. On top of which I can never understand much of what Anna Kendrick is saying with her thin little pipsqueak vocal fry. (Everything she says is a variation on the old Minnie Mouse helium voice…beep-beepity-beep-beep.) On top of which I felt like an idiot for having paid to see this, sitting there in the front row with my fucking small popcorn and large bottle of Dasani water.

Plus The Accountant has no sense of moral order or clarity or balance. Does anyone in this film breathe ordinary oxygen? Every character except Kendrick’s is fairly full of it, side-stepping, double-dealing, lying, misrepresenting, living by some expedient ethical code, a killer or an enabler of same. Or greedy. On top of which I don’t believe that a Treasury Department employee with a soiled past (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) would have been hired in the first place without her background being discovered. Don’t even start with that shit.

As it turns out my fears about the Criterion guys possibly making their McCabe and Mrs. Miller Bluray look darker or muddier than the original celluloid version were unfounded. Ditto the recent complaint by DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze about the McCabe Bluray looking “occasionally greenish and sometimes very brown, flat, dull and thick.“ It actually makes the film look better, most likely, than any screen-projected version did back in ’71. Every intended value — the feeling of constant fog, dampness and drizzle, that grainy-flashy look that Vilmos Zsigmond intended, the intense greens of the nearby forest, the indoor kerosene-lamp lighting — comes across with more vivid brushstrokes  and more exacting focus than ever before. Every frame has a kind of throbbing soft glow; you can almost smell the northwest atmosphere. It certainly leaves the Amazon streaming version in the dust; ditto the DVD that came out several years back. Criterion’s McCabe, in short, delivers what I consider to be a “bump,” but one with historic integrity. This is what the film looked like in ’71, except now it probably looks better than it did at the Beekman or Cinema 1 or whichever first-run situation it played in Manhattan. If he was still with us director Robert Altman would fully approve.

A guy I knew in my youth, called “Billy” by his friends, passed a few days ago. I’m sad and sorry but it happens — not everyone can be Norman Lloyd. Billy was a builder and a designer, but also the guy who opened a small window on my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he did it with just nine words. This also happens. Someone will express an opinion in just the right way with just the right number of words and the right kind of English….wham. Your viewpoint is altered.

We were sitting on a floor at a party in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during the Nixon administration, and Billy, fortified with lysergic acid diethylamide, was expounding on this and that. The subject of Israel came up, which Billy was no fan of. He saw Israel as an aggressive military bully — “tanks!” — appropriating Palestinian territory. Billy was brilliant and well-educated but no pretentious intellectual — he liked to talk like a farmer, a building foreman, a salt-of-the-earth type. Which is probably one reason why I’ve never forgotten his concluding statement on the Middle East dispute: “Lemme tell ya, them Ay-rabs, they got the lowdown.”

From that moment on, I began to feel more and more compassion for the Palestinians and to regard Israel with more and more suspicion.

And then ISIS happened. These days it’s hard not to be tugged by a certain concern about Ay-rabs, or at least those in their flock who not only have the lowdown but have cornered the market on crazy. That’s the wrong way to look at it, of course. I’m not a Trumpster. I’ll be voting for Hillary on 11.8. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the days in which Billy’s view exerted a certain influence have come to an end.

I’m in a small Virgin America jet somewhere over Colorado, and somehow I was able to stream this Fareed Zakaria interview with Bill Maher (posted today) without too much difficulty. Everything Maher says is precisely what I’ve been sensing, observing and thinking all along. Nothing more than that.

Reactions to last night’s Melanianade short on SNL? I’ve watched it three times now, and while it’s pretty good it’s…let’s leave it there. What I like most is the decision to shoot black-and-white and particularly go with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Tip of the hat to Cecily Strong (Melania Trump), Emily Blunt (Ivanka Trump), Kate Mckinnon (Kellyanne Conway), Sasheer Zamata (Omarosa, an early Apprentice contestant), Vanessa Bayer (Tiffany Trump) and Alec Baldwin (Donald Trump).