Everyone has been “ooh-ing and “aah”-ing the new trailer for Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (Paramount, 7.31). I’m not immune to the excitement but there’s a slight blemish on the franchise. I’m referring to the fact that right now the Tom Cruise brand is undergoing yet another denigration due to Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Relatively few have seen Gibney’s doc (it pops on HBO on 3.29) but I have, and I’m telling you once again, as I wrote in my Sundance review, that Cruise comes off as a “coddled loon” and an enabler of a decidedly venal organization.

In this light (and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that this “light” doesn’t exist) it’s hard to relax with Cruise in this M:I5 context as the brave and daring Ethan. It’s a stone fact that Cruise is a seriously tainted guy off-screen — a possibly oblivious benefactor who’s supported and promoted a gang of vicious hombres who behave like a kind of evil “syndicate” while Cruise looks the other way. Watch Gibney’s film and tell me you don’t care at all, that the disparity between Cruise’s on-screen superhero and the unsavory real-life propagandist he’s more or less become in actuality doesn’t bother you in the least.

“The first thing I’d say [is that] online we’ve got to embrace nuance over outrage. We’ve got to get past an outrage culture of reading things simply and making really broad conclusions about them, and instead ask questions and try to listen to each other better. Generally, we just aren’t doing a great job of listening to each other online. I don’t think in the end it’s very helpful for the overall quality of discourse.” — YA superstar John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars) talking to Refinery 29’s Sabrina Rojas Weiss about YA headliner Andrew Smith getting beaten up on Twitter for stating that his novels aren’t that invested in female characters because he “was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all.”

Good Kill (IFC Films, 4.10.15) “is about drone warfare and this righteous drama’s take on it. The military jargon is bogus and insulting. There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘good kill’, and Andrew Niccol’s drama will remind you of that repeatedly. Good Kill runs through the rituals of military slaughter. It dehumanizes the combatant and underlines the inhuman nature of collateral damage and strikes based on pattern behavior. It’s often slow and occasionally simplistic, but at least someone’s talking about the issue.” — Excerpted from Henry Barnes‘ Guardian review, filed on 9.12.14 from the Toronto Film festival.

Ken Loach‘s Jimmy’s Hall “is a no-frills, true-life drama about Irish rabble-rouser Jimmy Gralton upon returning to his native home after more than 20 years spent in the U.S., and about his conflicts with conservative forces who feared the possible igniting of a leftist movement, and Gralton’s subsequent deportation back to the U.S. It’s a Loach thing through and through — mid-tempo, working-class, earnest, low-key, authentic, political. I mean no disrespect when I say it’s a bit of a shrugger. There are vague echoes, of course, of today’s 1% vs. 99% equation, and a refrain of the old rule about dissidents always dealing with struggle and adversity. The painterly textures and atmosphere are what moved me the most. I miss the visual splendors of rural, old-time Ireland (the small-village architecture, the browns and greens, the candle-glow lighting) that Loach has often captured in his films, and which are exquisitely presented here. He shot it on that dying technological format known as celluloid.” — filed from Cannes on 5.22.14.

Yesterday Pierre Morel and Sean Penn‘s The Gunman opened on 2816 screens and tallied a first-day gross of $1,769,000, which averages out to $628 per theatre. A problematic but reasonably diverting film, The Gunman performed only slightly better yesterday than Matthew Vaughn‘s reprehensible Kingsman: The Secret Service, which opened five weeks ago and has earned about $111 million thus far. To me the Morel-Penn is far more tolerable than the Vaughn, but American audiences don’t agree. You can’t expect fairness or justice at the box-office, but The Gunman didn’t deserve to die such an ignominious death.

It’s a significant deal to some, I hope, that a Criterion Bluray of Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out is streeting on 4.14. Not so much for me as I purchased the British Network Region 2 Bluray (which has some of the same extras as the Criterion) two and a half years ago, or in August of 2012.  Odd Man Out is regarded as a serious classic by boomer and GenX film mavens (or at least the more devoted of these), but I wonder if there are any under-35s who even know or care. I need to keep reminding myself that under-35s regard ’80s films as old, ’60s and ’70s films as wheelchair material and almost anything made before that as too musty by half.

What I’m about to pass along happened 10 or 12 days ago. Only now can it be told. Bullshit — I just couldn’t be bothered to write about it until today, and even now I don’t feel all that motivated. But it happened. I was on the Yamaha and nudging my way out of an alley, about to cross northbound traffic on Robertson Blvd. and enter the southbound lanes. I vroomed across the northbound lanes and puttered my way toward the light on Burton Way, “splitting lanes” between two rows of idling engines. I then decided to veer into the far right lane just ahead of a large white SUV, but as I began to turn the SUV honked and blocked me by lurching forward. Slight brake screech. Okay, I said to myself. Some guy wants to play Dodge City.

The SUV driver, a smallish dude in a white tank top who looked a lot (but not exactly) like Kevin Hart, began to scold and sneer like his life, pride, financial future and family history depended on it…”fuck you think you’re fuckin’ doin’, motherfuckah?” I glanced and turned away. But even if I’d been the hair-trigger type a sixth sense was telling me to back off. If I’d said a single word or raised a single eyebrow, this guy might have leapt out of his car and gone all Ving Rhames or Suge Knight on me. Maybe. I definitely felt the readiness. My attempting to nudge in front of him was a major territorial challenge.

The one and only time I saw Steven Spielberg‘s 1941 was inside a small Manhattan screening room about a month before it opened, or sometime in mid-November of ’79. When it began with a parody of the opening Jaws beach scene with a pretty blonde taking a nude swim in the sea, complete with John Williams‘ Jaws theme music, I wanted to say out loud, “Holy crap, Spielberg is paying tribute to himself!?…he’s starting this film with an homage to his own Hollywood success to get a laugh!? My God!” Stanley Kubrick gave it to Spielberg straight when the latter visited the Elstree set of The Shining. “I saw your last movie, 1941,” Kubrick said. “It was great. It wasn’t funny but it was expertly made. You should have sold it as a drama.” I liked one scene — i.e., when Robert Stack‘s General Stillwell is chuckling happily and then choking up during a Hollywood Boulevard screening of Walt Disney‘s Dumbo.

A special extended version of 1941 running 146 minutes — 28 minutes longer than the original 118-minute cut — will screen at the American Cinematheque on Sunday afternoon at 5 pm, and I must say there’s a perverse part of me that wants to attend and endure this calamity all over again, just so I can say (a) “I saw the nearly two-and-a-half hour version!” and (b) “Let no one say I’m not willing to reconsider an opinion.”

Until a couple of days ago I’d never quite thought of 1971 as one of the truly legendary years in American cinema, or at least not along the lines of 1939 or ’62 or ’99. But on 3.18 a longish piece by a guy whose name might be Cole Brax (a vague echo of Cole Trickle, Tom Cruise‘s character in Days of Thunder) suggested this very thing. He didn’t make a complete-enough case for ’71’s lasting glory, but he definitely began the conversation. Key quote: “What I do know is that in 1971 many of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived released some of their best work. At the time, most of my favorite directors in film history were still active or just getting started. I don’t know what was in the water or the air that year (probably drugs), but the films that came out of that annum created a ripple effect that is felt to this very day.”

As noted Brax only lists a portion of the finest so here’s a more complete rundown, and listed in order of my personal preference:

Top 27 1971 Films: (1) The French Connection; (2) The Last Picture Show; (3) A Clockwork Orange (4) The Hospital, (5) McCabe & Mrs. Miller, (6) Sunday Bloody Sunday, (7) Get Carter, (8) Straw Dogs, (9) Murmur of the Heart, (10) Dirty Harry, (11) Klute, (12) Walkabout, (13) Two English Girls, (14) Death in Venice, (15) Two-Lane Blacktop, (16) Taking Off, (17) Carnal Knowledge, (18) Harold and Maude, (19) Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, (20) The Emigrants, (21) The Devils, (22) Play Misty for Me, (23) The Panic in Needle Park, (24) THX 1138, (25) Duel, (26) Little Murders, (27) Le Mans.

A 3.19 article by Nerdist contributor Kyle Hill reveals that Interstellar co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan didn’t agree with the ending that his brother Chris went with. Speaking on 3.28 during a seminar at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Jonathan said that he would have preferred a “much more straightforward” finale. He basically said that Matthew McConaughey would have died in the middle of the “Einstein-Rosen bridge” or wormhole.

The second I read this I realized that I don’t ever want to see Interstellar again. I honestly wouldn’t sit through it if you paid me $50 or even $100 to do so. Okay, I would see it again for $1000. But the more I think back upon that exasperating film, the more repelled I feel.

My blood is up about watching Todd Kessler‘s Bloodline, the 13-episode Netflix series that began streaming today. I’m especially looking forward to hanging with Kyle Chandler, one of the most engaging and fascinating middle-period actors around today. If only scuzzy Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing the older “bad” brother. I know I complained about this only a month ago, but Mendelsohn exudes the exact same reptilian vibe in role after role. (The only exception has been his amiable-gambler role in the not-yet-released Mississippi Grind.) Like I said before, Mendelsohn walks into a room and it’s “okay, here’s the sweaty scumbag who’s going to poison the well and drag everyone to hell.” He’s Lurch in The Addams Family. He always glares, always perspires, always seethes and seems to constantly smoke no matter what role he’s playing. Bad guys are always more interesting if they don’t radiate venality out of every pore, as Mendelsohn does. And yet 95 times out of 100 casting directors always hire actors who look like they were born evil and breast-fed by Mama Satan.

Ben Palmer‘s Man Up has no U.S. distributor and is presently only scheduled to open in Ireland, the U.K. and a couple of other territories. It might be okay but I was slightly bothered by an age-gap issue right off the top. It’s an old tradition in Hollywood-funded romcoms and romances for the guy to be 20 or 25 years older than the girl. (58 year-old Clark Gable romancing 24 year-old Sophia Loren in 1959’s It Started in Naples) but Man Up‘s fleet indie-ish vibe suggests a non-traditional approach. Simon Pegg is 45 but (I’m sorry to say this but it’s true) looks like he’s pushing 48 or 49. Lake Bell turns 36 next week and was 35 when the film was shot. Man Up begins with Pegg assuming Bell is a 24 year-old woman he met online, so the film is telling us she looks ten years younger than her age. So while Pegg and Bell are only 10 years apart in actuality, their appearances suggest a gap of 20 or even 25 years. In short Pegg looks old enough to be Bell’s dad. Which is obviously fine if they’d made that part of the story, but apparently they haven’t. This aside, Bell delivers a fairly convincing British accent.