I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. In Charley Varrick, John Vernon‘s Maynard Boyle is a mob-connected banker who is enormously relieved when Walter Matthau tells him he wants to return $750K that was unintentionally stolen during a Las Cruces bank robbery. After he hangs up, Vernon makes a gesture with his left hand that says “sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” It’s the most elegant piece of acting that Vernon ever performed, and yet when I mentioned this to Vernon on the set of Hail To The Chief in the spring of ’85 he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He all but ignored me, and I was probably the only guy on the planet who’d ever recognized, much less said to him, that his Charley Varrick hand gesture (it happens at exactly the 2:00 mark) was some kind of beautiful.

Hollywood Elsewhere has just contributed $100 to a Vidiots Indiegogo campaign to raise $65K. They need to move things into the 21st Century or words to that effect. Vidiots is basically a place to rent VHS films that haven’t made it to Bluray or streaming. I haven’t owned a VCR player for 15 years and I’m still vaguely irked at Vidiots for telling me I owed them $125 after I returned a lost-and-then-found VHS of The Wizard of Oz back in ’90. The total value of the VHS was maybe $75 — I refused to pay anything more than that. The Vidiots clerk insisted on the higher figure so I told him forget it and refused to pay them anything. I’ve contributed $100 because for all their obstinacy, Vidiots is a store with heart and spirit, and because its existence enhances the cultural character of Santa Monica.

Angelina Jolie to Tom Brokaw: “If this [movie] was anything close to our real marriage, we couldn’t have made it.” Uh-huh, and the issues that led to yesterday’s announcement of a divorce only manifested after she and Brad sat down with Brokaw?

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is throwing a two-hour party this evening for the award-season blogaroonies and strategists. The location is Eveleigh — a name that’s damn near impossible to remember. (Why don’t they just call it Everly? Beverly minus B = Everly brothers = simple.) I don’t know where this impulse is coming from, but I’d love it if tonight’s event could devolve into a friendly pie-throwing affair. A good-natured release of tension and pretension. Along the lines of that 1965 Soupy Sales segment when Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Trini Lopez went at it.

Yesterday Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny announced he’s been cut loose, and that he’s starting a new fiction-driven site. (I pasted the URL somewhere but now I can’t find it.) Last year McWeeny got mad at me for suggesting that Hitfix had lost its soul by canning Kris Tapley, Daniel Fienberg and Gregory Ellwood. McQueeny’s view at the time was that “a difference in editorial direction doesn’t make it a bad place to work.” Uh-huh.

I just sent an email to Drew’s Hitfix address (Drew@hitfix.com), and it bounced right back. The courteous thing would have been for the Hitfix guys to keep his email address live for a month until he’s given everyone fresh contact info. But Hitfix can’t be bothered with that stuff.

I wrote McWeeny a portion of the following message this morning: “Despite your unrelenting ugliness towards me, I am not going to match your assholery by celebrating the loss of your Hitfix gig or wishing you ill. You are a gifted, hard-working, passionate writer, and I want to see you back in the swing of things because the discussion will be richer for that, despite your continuing allegiance to Comic-Conery and general fanboy crap.

A vote for Jill Stein will be a vote for Orange Hitler. Really, it will be. The basic idea in this Joss Whedon spot is that Millenials have to man up on 11.8 — shake it off for 24 hours — because the only thing that matters is preventing Orange Hitler from winning. That’s it, there’s nothing else, not even their feelings of disappointment about their ideals or dreams being unfulfilled. Millenials can go right back to their default emotions on 11.9, but on 11.8 they need to man up, hold their noses and vote for Hillary. Because Joss and Team Avengers (i.e., Tony Stark, Hulk, Black Widow, War Machine, etc.) really want them to do that. And because War Machine is entirely correct when he calls Orange Hitler “a racist, abusive coward who would permanently damage the fabric of our society.” Please, whining Millennials, don’t do it…don’t give us Brexit, Part 2: Apocalypse.

Curtis Hanson, a gifted director whose devotion to cinema knew no bounds and who enjoyed a nearly 30-year run of potency from ’78’s The Silent Partner (Hanson’s superb script was directed by Daryl Duke) to ’05’s In Her Shoes, was found dead today. He was 71. The poor guy had been out of the game for the last four-plus years due to Alzheimer’s disease, but he was one of the near-greats and a first-rate human being — brilliant, warm-hearted, a good listener, perceptive.

I knew Curtis somewhat, especially during his hot-streak run between the early ’90s and mid-aughts, and he was always friendly and, when questions arose, as candid as the situation allowed. Hanson came to one of my Hot-Shot Movies classes in September ’97 to screen L.A. Confidential and field questions. I remember saying to the crowd that Confidential was a brilliant translation of a dense and sprawling James Ellroy novel, and was like a beautifully assembled Swiss watch, every shot, line and scene contributing smartly to the whole and fitting together just so.

Confidential was Hanson’s best film  — nobody will dispute that. But he also directed (and forgive me for repeating myself) the under-rated Losin’ It (Tom Cruise and his teenage pals getting into trouble in Tijuana), The Bedroom Window (’87), Bad Influence (’90), The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (’92), The River Wild (’94), Wonder Boys (’00 — a great stoner flick), 8 Mile (’02) and In Her Shoes. Ten serious winners.

Netflix streaming. 100% RT rating. Missed it in Toronto. Viewable by end of the month.

In his review of Criterion’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller Bluray, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, who always emphasizes the positive and almost always bends over backwards to minimize adverse judgment, seems to be expressing displeasure, at least as far as my understanding of the English language is concerned. He’s not exactly panning the Criterion Bluray but he’s certainly not jumping for joy. Be honest — how do you feel about buying a Bluray that makes a film look “occasionally greenish and sometimes very brown, flat, dull and thick“?

Tooze recalls that during a Toronto Bell Lightbox panel in 2014, McCabe dp Vilmos Zsigmond said that “if they had movies in [the frontier] days they would look faded away, scratchy, grainy and very soft and no contrast.” To achieve this look Zsigmond used flashing (exposing negative to light) to underexpose the film. And so, Tooze writes, “we have a brief understanding of how McCabe & Mrs. Miller was intended to visually appear. The final product, he acknowledges, is “probably wholly authentic to the filmmakers’ wishes.”

I get and respect the misty, somber, brownishly subdued, lantern-lit rainy thing, but “occasionally greenish”?

The supermarket tabs announcing an imminent Brangelina breakup has been a non-thing for years (glance at and dismiss the check-out headlines in less than two seconds) but once in a blue moon these mustard-gas stories turn out to be right. Or more precisely the National Enquirer nails it. Last December the Enquirer breathlessly bannered a $450 divorcement settlement story (said to be rooted in cheating), but then it was denied two months later. But today legit news orgs said it’s true, and, according to Page Six, the split happened over Angie having learned through a private investigator that Brad was putting the high hard one to Marion Cotillard, his Allied costar. If nothing else this domestic tragedy (their kids Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne will suffer bruises) will almost certainly boost Allied‘s box-office, but will it harm or hurt whatever awards-related opportunities it might have? Robert Zemeckis‘ World War II drama, distributed by Paramount, pops on 11.23.