The allusion, of course, is to John Carpenter‘s They Live and not Costa Gavras‘s Z (’69). The latter title echoed a popular Greek protest slogan that meant “he lives” — a reference to assassinated Greek leftist politician Grigoris Lambrakis. Speaking of politicans, I’m actually a wee bit concerned that Donald Trump’s poll numbers are slipping. The better he does in the Republican primaries, the better things look for Hillary/Biden/Sanders.

There are three months left in 2015, and if you boil the fat and pretense out of all the noteworthy films released or seen over the last nine months, the ones that really stand out big-time are Spotlight, Mad Max: Fury Road, Love & Mercy, Carol, Son of Saul, Truth, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, It Follows, About Elly and Brooklyn. Yeah, that’s right — Love & Mercy in third place. And it’s time turn the engine over and start with an award-season campaign. I’m looking to do phoners with a few name-brand actors and filmmakers who are fans and don’t mind saying so. Five or so, I’m thinking. I’ll call it “The Love & Mercy Conversations: Artists Speak Up For The Little Movie That Could and Did”…something like that.

I forgot about last Monday’s all-media screening of Nancy Meyer‘s The Intern so I’m catching a 7 pm showing at the Hollywood Arclight — 3 and 1/2 hours from now. 53% at Rotten Tomatoes, 51% at Metacritic. I know what I’m getting into here. Fave quote #1: “It’s astonishing to watch De Niro — who’s been great in great movies like The Godfather: Part II and Taxi Driver, and sometimes just as good or even better in imperfect ones like New York, New York — and realize that he’s just as capable as any other actor of slouching through a film like a lump of mold making its way down a tree limb. It’s as if he’s trying to keep all traces of actual personality or verve under wraps.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Village Voice. Fave quote #2: “Meyers has wit and a solid sense of craft, but mainly she makes movies about high thread counts and comfy, pricey throw pillows.” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune. High thread counts?

I felt as if I’d been injected with an exciting spiritual drug when I first saw Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, which opens tomorrow. I’ve seen it three times since last March and have felt the same juices each time. Because it’s a film about transcendence — about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper comic libertine to social revolutionary. I fell in love with the arc of his life, which is that he finally found his focus and got it right after floundering around (somewhat like Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, all of whom found their calling after an uncertain period in their 20s). He became truly interesting when he stopped projecting like a hyper, swaggering, shag-crazy narcissist and became a “champagne socialist” revolutionary and began saying “look at what’s wrong here”…that’s when Brand became a lightning bolt.

Russell Brand, director Ondi Timoner during final shooting on BRAND: A Second Coming.

I wrote last March that Timoner’s doc (partly shot by HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko) is “one of the most unusual and impressive documentary portraits of a famous person I’ve ever seen because of…well, its eagerness to step out of the standard function of a documentary and take the proverbial ride. It’s a film that transcends itself and becomes something else by embracing the attitude and temperament of its subject. Just as Brand has begun moving the focus of his life beyond fame and wealth and the lowest form of humor (i.e., simply making people laugh), Brand: A Second Coming is about seeing and transcending and turning a page.”

Through all the excitement I chose to ignore Brand’s decision not to travel to Austin to help promote Timoner’s doc, which basic professional courtesy required. Brand explained that despite his admiration for Timoner’s film that he wasn’t comfortable discussing the portion of her doc that covers his sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll period (i.e., roughly the first 40 minutes).

I also looked the other way when he got together with Michael Winterbottom to make a somewhat similar documentary, The Emperor’s New Clothes, that covers a lot of the same material in Timoner’s film. Clothes was barely paid attention to on these shores, but the most forgiving person in the world would have to admit this was a huge dick move on Brand’s part.

All hail the debut of “Little Gold Men“, a twice-monthly podcast from Vanity Fair‘s Katey Rich, Mike Hogan and Richard Lawson. They mainly focus on the two biggest Toronto Film Festival flicks, Spotlight and Room. Following the first press-and-industry screening of Spotlight everyone was saying “this will win Best Picture,” Lawson says. “It’ll win?” Rich replies. Soon after she opines that Room, winner of the Toronto Film Festival audience award, is small and sentimental and quite affecting. No mention of any XY chromosone pushback but there’s a brief derogatory mention of yours truly — “the Jeff Wellses of the world and the notorious Hollywood Elsewhere.” That’s the only critical remark heard in the podcast. I don’t know about these guys. They’re no one’s idea of ruthlessly honest, but every so often they’re ruthlessly accommodating. Can’t give those award-season advertisers anything to get pissy about.

The title of the piece that accompanies the podcast is “So, Is Johnny Depp Finally Going to Win That Oscar?” Answer: No, but he might be nominated because of the Alaskan husky contact lenses and hair-sprayed Bulger wig. Rich asks if Johnny Depp‘s performance in Black Mass will be an Oscar-level thing, and mentions that she “really love[s]” Joel Edgerton in Black Mass…c’mon! His Bahhstun accent is grating and he slightly (and sometimes oppressively) over-emotes in every scene. Rich admits later on that the film probably isn’t good enough to deliver a serious springboard bounce for Depp, but says that Depp’s performance might keep the film alive in a conversational sense.

In the speculative spitball realm Cate Blanchett is running against herself in the Best Actress category. The Weinstein Co. is pushing her touching Carol performance for Best Actress consideration, and in their usual favored-nations way Sony Pictures Classics is advocating her nomination in the same category for her gutsy, steely turn in James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. Blanchett may be nominated for one of these but winning the Oscar again after her 2013 Blue Jasmine victory is unlikely. The only way to win a second time is to top the previous performance, and if you ask me her Truth performance definitely outshines her work in Carol, and even, I feel, the acting she delivered under the direction of Woody Allen. Her work in Truth is blistering, ballsier; the role is more realistically tragic. I made a similar statement 15 years ago when Steven Soderbergh‘s direction of Traffic and Erin Brockovich were deemed equally award-worthy. I posted a “letter to the Academy” piece on Reel.com that insisted his work on Traffic was far superior, and that’s what he finally wound up taking the Best Directing Oscar for. It would be gracious if the Weinsteiners were to decide to focus on Rooney Mara‘s expected Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance as Blanchett’s lover and let the Blanchett thing go. They won’t do that, of course. Award-season strategizing is not a game of croquet; it’s more like rugby. But the proof is in the pudding and Blanchett’s Mary Mapes, trust me, is quite the thing.

All hail the late Yogi Berra — one of the greatest baseball players and most noteworthy philosophers of the 20th Century, and a real-deal American legend. I’m not much for eulogies of baseball champs as I’ve been to fewer than ten games in my entire life, but boy, did I love what Berra was or seemed to be — a guy who looked a bit like a monkey from a mezzzanine-level seat but had the spark of something-or-other, something that felt grand and hearty and poetic — he stood for persistence, leg muscles, hard work, a sense of humor, Yoohoo soft drink and Miller High Life. And he had a gift for dugout eloquence second to none. Short, strong, muscular, great smile, great attitude…and he lived in Montclair, New Jersey. What a guy.

What if Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Laurence Olivier costarred in a first-rate historical war satire at the peak of their respective popularity and power in 1959, and nobody cared all that much when it opened and nobody at all (except for guys like me) gives a damn about it today? 20 months ago I posted a piece about how it was impossible to watch The Devil’s Disciple, a respectable, vigorously acted adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play about the Revolutionary War, outside of an annual July 4th airing by TCM. I reported that the black-and-white drama, directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Thunderball), wasn’t on DVD or Bluray, and that you couldn’t stream it on Netflix, Hulu or Vudu. But now, lo and behold, a Bluray version from Kino will street on 11.24.15.

In my book any 1950s film captured in VistaVision and rendered in Bluray and/or high-def streaming is worth seeing, even if the movie itself is mediocre. One mark of a serious cinephile is the ability to ignore script or acting flaws and just zero in on the cinematography, which in this instance is fairly ripe and robust. It is therefore permissible to have an interest in a Bluray of Hal Kanter‘s Loving You (’57), which was shot in VistaVision by the great Charles Lang — an Oscar nominee for his lensing of Sabrina, Separate Tables, Some Like It Hot and One-Eyed Jacks.

There is, of course, no such thing as a really good Elvis Presley film, but the first three — Love Me Tender, Loving You and King Creole — are at least tolerable, and the semi-autobiographical Loving You, the only color film in this trio, is the only one in which Presley performs a few straight-up ’50s rock tunes. Paramount may have leased the rights to Warner Home Video or not, but for some reason there’s no Bluray or high-def streaming version of Loving You for sale or on the horizon– only an out-of-print Lionsgate DVD from 2003, which collectors are selling for $70 bucks and higher. Forget it.

Hand-crafted leather wristbands are for long-of-tooth rock musicians like Keith Richards — venerated, old-school guys who want to exude a certain still-at-it studliness. Maybe younger guys wear them also — what do I know? –but I’m pretty sure that no one wears them except for performing musicians, and I don’t mean guys who play for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I once saw a photo of Jean Genet wearing something like this. I wore one for a few months back in the late ’70s, but I threw it away when a girlfriend or my mother said it looked too leather bar-ish or whatever. In any event a vague Keith Richards mood overcame me last night when I was browsing around the Will leather goods store in Venice, and now I’ve got this thing around my right wrist. It’s not too thick, has a nice weave — I don’t see the problem.

It took Sony Pictures Classics an awfully long time to release their Truth trailer, but here it finally is, a little more than three weeks before the 10.16 opening. Concise, nicely cut, pro-level — more of a grade-school introduction to Rathergate than a summary of the flinty, well-modulated, hard-hitting flick I saw in Toronto, but it’s certainly good enough for openers. Note: I would have posted this a couple of hours earlier but I had one of those James Stewart-meets-Carlotta Valdez-in-Vertigo wee hour wakeups (bolt upright, eyes glaring) at 3:30 am. I eventually crashed again and re-awoke at 9 am.

I’ve been telling myself over and over that I wouldn’t buy Criterion’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle Bluray because the DVD version is perfectly fine. And then I weakened last night during a visit to Amoeba, and before I knew it I traded it for some Blurays I didn’t want and then I drove home and popped it into the Oppo around 10:30 pm. Wow…this is really, really much better than the DVD. Much. The added detail is so fresh and eye-filling that you just want to dive into it. It looks like a perfect, un-projected print delivered by the lab a few hours ago. The colors are much more vibrant and life-like. I still resent that Criterion cropped it at 1.85:1 when it’s obvious from the 1.66:1 opening credit sequence that a good amount of information has been cleavered for no good reason, but this is magnificent work. Cheers to the Criterion team. This is the best Coyle I’ve ever seen or will see for the rest of my life.