Last December I noted that Synapse Films’ Bluray of Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will was the first to abandon the traditional blue-trim packaging (routine on just about every Bluray the world over) in favor of funereal black. The black was insisted upon by restoration guru Robert Harris, who felt that the doc’s content and history demanded it. Today the Bluray for Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrived, and the first thing I noticed was the black plastic trim. So now there are two Blurays with this signature appearance, but only one with a thematic reason for being black. I’m told that 4k Blurays also have black trim but who buys or even inspects those at retail stores?

I was feeling twinges of sadness and resentment at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and had I unfolded what I was feeling I might have written something akin to what Devin Faraci has tapped out here. Faraci knows the geek realm better than I, but I’ve been a Zack Snyder hater for a few years now and so Faraci’s article, which is titled “Superman and the Damage Done,” stirred something more than agreement. It ignited emotions that I felt but hadn’t articulated. Here’s an excerpt:

“Zack Snyder’s intentions in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman is to destroy Superman, something he actually accomplishes literally at the end of the latest film. I can only imagine what sort of hyper-distant, Dr. Manhattan-ish being Snyder will pull from that grave in a future movie, especially since BvS has officially killed off Superman’s human alter ego, Clark Kent. Snyder has been chipping away at the foundations of Superman for some time, killing Dr. Emil Hamilton, a close comrade of Superman, in Man of Steel, and unceremoniously executing Jimmy Olsen in this film.

“BvS also tells us that Snyder has every intention of killing Lois Lane in the future, as his gameplan for the future of the DC Movieverse is to recreate the Injustice game/comic, where Superman becomes a murderous warlord after Lois Lane is killed.

Donald Trump seems unable or unwilling to do research. If he did he could at least make it seem that he knows what he’s talking about. But no — he seems to be winging it, making it up as he goes along. Using verbal precision when stating beliefs or positions during interviews seems to constantly elude him. That line he shared with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews about women who’ve had abortions needing to face “some form of punishment” was promptly walked back, but the next appalling statement is just around the corner. He just can’t play it like a pro. He has to start fires.

If Trump is nominated Hillary Clinton has the Presidency totally locked and in the bag. The Republicans know they’ll lose if he’s nominated, and so the current talk seems to be that they need to deny Trump the nomination in Cleveland and at least lose with a candidate they can stomach.

I haven’t linked to that two-day-old essay by former Trump PAC spokesperson Stephanie Cegielski, but it seems to contain all anyone needs to know about the game Trump is playing. Yes, Snopes Dan Evon reported yesterday that while Cegielski was a strategist for the Make America Great Again super PAC, she was never Trump’s “communications manager and top strategist.” But she was close enough to his campaign to write the following, which should give pause to anyone with half a brain:

“[Donald Trump] does not know policy, nor does he have the humility to admit what he does not know — the most frightening position of all.

“I consider myself a part of the silent majority that led to Trump’s rise, which is why I want you to know that I am with you — I wanted Trump to be real, too.

“He is not. He even says so himself. His misogyny? That’s the character. His presidential candidacy? That’s a character, too.

My agonizing sound-synch issues have been solved…I think. The miracle worker was a guy named John Tillett (jtillett@inctech.net) from a San Fernando Valley outfit called INC Technologies. Tillett’s genius move was to disconnect the cable connecting the Digital Audio Output (located at the rear of any high-def TV) to the Sony sound bar, and instead use an HDMI cable to employ the ARC (Audio return Channel) option. 20 minutes after he arrived the sound from all devices (Oppo Bluray, Roku 4, Direct TV, Sherwood Region 2 Bluray) was perfectly synched. Coping with this issue has been a terrible throbbing headache for me, and now it seems to finally be over. And if it’s not I can always call Tillett and ask him to drop by. I’ve talked to several people about this problem over a period of three or four weeks, and not one of them even mentioned the ARC option. This is the home-tech world we live in now. Not that many people understand the whole equation.

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the almost uniformly positive reactions to Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special were due to the fact that (a) critics have decided Nichols is one of the auteurist good guys and a likable one at that, and therefore (b) any semi-coherent film he makes gets at least a pass if not a thumbs-up. The same thing seems to be happening now with Richard Linklater and his latest film, Everybody Wants Some!, which currently has ratings of 97% and 84% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

It’s not that critics are being too kind (although I think some of them are) but most are not really levelling with their readers. Which is why people don’t trust them. They know/sense that critics live in their own elite realm, and that they always seem to write about this realm (self-regarding, navel-gazing) rather than the one inhabited by ticket-buyers.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with recognizing and celebrating Linklater’s exceptional vision and extraordinary focus, but at the same time you have to at least mention that Everybody Wants Some! doesn’t tell anything close to a story, and that there are millions of Joe Popcorns out there who go to movies expecting some kind of narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s fine to say “this is better than the usual-usual, and it’s so special that it doesn’t need to tell a story”…no problem with that. But you have to at least admit that the none-too-hips are going to have a problem with a movie that ignores the playbook and makes up its own whimsical music as it goes along.

 The good news is that Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some! is cool, smart, fresh, atypical. It’s a period campus ramble-on, set in the climes of Texas State University in 1980, and more particularly a situational thing that feels enjoyably realistic and familiar in at least a couple of hundred different ways.

The bad news is that it’s mostly about a bunch of baseball-star jocks sharing a fraternity house, and athletes, I feel, are always a drag to hang with because they’re mostly a bunch of pea-brains — hormonal, relentlessly competitive, single-minded, somewhat conservative, egoistic, and lacking in curiosity. I’m sorry but I’ve been around the track a couple of hundred times and that’s my opinion.

Then again Everybody Wants Some! is a refreshingly unusual jocks-on-a-college-campus comedy, which is to say something quieter and more oblique and introspective and curious about what makes this or that guy tick. It spends a whole lotta time answering that last line of inquiry.

Yes, it’s frequently amusing but I’m not even sure if it’s fair to use the word “comedy.” It dispenses a steady torrent of little laugh sliders that make you chortle or grin or guffaw, but it never strains to be “funny.” Either you’re paying attention and enjoying the observational servings or you’re not.

Susan Sarandon feels that there’s really no comparison between Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy is some kind of heaven-sent, once-in-a-lifetime event, and the profoundly sullied, corporate-moneyed Hillary Clinton, who’s “not on the right side” of things. Sarandon’s assessment is more correct than not and I’ll never be ecstatic about Clinton’s candidacy, but I’m definitely voting for her. Put it this way — it’ll be nihilistic to not vote against Trump winning. Not a happy situation, agreed. Sarandon may not admit this, but if Bernie were to capture the Democratic nomination (which can’t possibly happen) he would be George McGovern in ’72.

Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead will stream eventually, but the Magnolia Bluray comes out of the gate on 4.19. I plugged and plugged this doc for months after catching it at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. “Quite the cultural landmark…about something that nearly everyone understands or identifies with to some degree, which is the seed and birth of anarchic, counter-conventional, ultra-outlandish comedy, which everybody takes for granted today but was a whole new thing when it popped out of the National Lampoon in 1970.”

I wasn’t paying much attention when Chuck Todd’s MTP Daily, a daily spinoff of Meet The Press, popped last September. But editors of NewscastStudio, a trade publication for creative pros working in television, were, and I’m genuinely surprised that they didn’t acknowledge that the Capitol building logo design is a direct lift from Saul Bass‘s art for Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent (’62). NewscastStudo quote, posted on 9.28.15: “The show uses a very animated style for its graphics, likening it to ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ The look, a vast departure from the Sunday show, brings a fun and playful patriotism to MTP Daily.”

If there was a semblance of a mature, grown-up attitude within Donald Trump and particularly his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the March 8th arm-grabbing incident between Lewandowski and former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields would have gone away weeks ago. All Lewandowski had to do was (a) apologize for being overzealous in trying to shield Trump and (b) offer to cover Fields’ medical costs and traumatic discomfort expenses — which is almost a silly notion considering that all Fields received was a very slight arm bruise. But Trump/Melandowski weren’t mature and sensible in their responses to the incident, denying and dismissing and downplaying, and now Melandowski has been arrested in Jupiter, Florida, for battery. The new video tells the tale. Melandowski responded to Fields grabbing Trump’s arm like a thuggish bodyguard with an alcohol problem. Trump said today that he’s standing by Melandowski because he doesn’t want the guy’s life to be “destroyed” by this incident, which I understand on a certain level. But immature blustery behavior creates and perpetrates its own karma.

If you have any kind of half-decent film on your hands, the standard approach is to start screening it for elite critic-journos a few weeks beforehand, and then show it to the all-media crowd nine or ten days in advance of the commercial opening. For whatever reason Paramount dismissed this strategy when it came to Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some, which opens tomorrow (3.30) but technically starts showing tonight for Landmark ticket-buyers. The Everybody all-media also happens tonight at the Paramount lot, and before this there was only the South by Southwest debut. The usual routine of showing it to choice critical elites didn’t happen here. (A friend who always gets early-bird invites was only invited to tonight’s all-media.)

This morning a producer friend told me about how Jack Nicholson saved Jim Harrison‘s financial ass in 1978 with a loan of $15K. The late author-poet (whose recent death prompted yesterday’s post) became friendly with Nicholson through novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, who had written The Missouri Breaks (’76) . McGuane and Harrison had met from their mutual base of Livingston, Montana. Harrison published three books in the early to mid ’70s — “Wolf: A False Memoir” (’71), “A Good Day to Die” (’73) and “Farmer” (’76), but the income from these works was negligible and by ’78 he was “broke and all but starving,” the producer relates. Harrison was working on “Legends of the Fall” (which was actually three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”) and so Nicholson, advised by McGuane of Harrison’s desperate situation, stepped in with the $15K, which gave Harrison enough breathing room to finish. “Fall” was published in ’79. It became Harrison’s biggest success of his life at the time, and he lived more or less comfortably after that. Here, by the way, is a nice Outside piece on Harrison (“The Last Lion,” published on 8.31.11) by Tom Bissell. Curious milestone: 13 months from now Nicholson will turn 80. Salud!