Poor Richard Jewell…falsely harassed by the news media and hounded by the FBI in ’96 over suspicions that he was the Centennial Olympic Park bomber, derided for his corpulent weirdo appearance (Jay Leno called him the “Una-doofus” and a federal agent called him “Unabubba“), and finally dead at age 44 from heart failure and diabetes, which was partially due to genes (bad luck) but almost certainly exacerbated by too many cupcakes. Poor guy, hard knocks, tough life.

No one is allowed to mention the unmentionable element in this sad saga (you will certainly never hear a word about this from the fine folks at Indiewire), but I’m going to mention it anyway. Does anyone believe that Jewell would have been zeroed in on and accused as much as he was if he’d looked like Jon Hamm instead of Paul Walter Hauser? People saw a moustachioed beach ball and figured, “He looks like a dweeby basement dweller…he has an aura of otherness about him…has this guy ever worked out?…he probably wakes up for snacks at 3 am.”

Jewell was unfortunately guilty of not looking like Cary Grant, but otherwise everyone was wrong — Jewell was innocent of wrongdoing. The authorities ultimately nabbed, convicted and imprisoned another guy for the bombing.

Clint Eastwood’s film (Warner Bros., 12.13) will be all about Jewell’s raw deal, and how the news media machine (especially Atlanta Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, played by Olivia Wilde, with a special boost from NBC’s Tom Brokaw) turned his life upside down and sent poor Richard into the darkest corners of hell.

Sam Rockwell has the good-guy role, portraying Jewell’s real-life attorney L. Lin Wood but under another name, “Watson Bryant.”

There’s nothing catastrophic or even dramatic about a guy in his late ’70s having a stent put into a heart valve after experiencing chest pains. But it’s obviously a bad thing for a 78 year-old Presidential candidate. It just reminds everyone what naturally happens among people of Sanders’ age. Nobody will ever call him “drooling” Bernie — he’s a sharp, tough, tenacious bulldog, and a much more vigorous candidate than “Typewriter” Joe Biden. I’m just saying that people don’t want to know from heart conditions when it comes to would-be Presidents. Sanders has been sinking in the polls; cruel as it may sound, this episode will probably cause him to sink further.

Guillermo del Toro‘s 13-part tweet stream on The Irishman is pretty damn good. I’ve pasted six of the tweets in an order that I prefer, as opposed to the order in which GGT posted them. Sorry but I’m allowed to do this. Here’s the whole thing.

Boiled down, GDT is acknowledging or reminding that everybody fucking dies sooner or later, and the “withering on the vine” and assisted living part is no joke, and boy, does this film remind us of where we’ll all headed sooner or later, and that arriving at this point without a George Harrison-like mystical current inside you or, failing that, at least a good spiritual hand-holding current by way of family and friends…approaching the Big Sleep without these things is not advisable. Not having them, in fact, is horrible. Because one way or the other we’re all approaching a Barry Lyndon state of total and absolute equality.

Last night Joaquin Phoenix offered a Hollywood Elsewhere-style apology to Joker cinematographer Lawrence (“Larry”) Sher for having bitched about Sher’s constant whispering during shooting and giving Phoenix the nickname “Cher.” It happened on the Jimmy Kimmel Show after Kimmel played some video footage (supplied by Joker director Todd Phillips) of Phoenix carping on the Joker set.

Phoenix’s apology begins around the 10:15 mark…love it!

Phoenix to Larry: “The constant whispering…just shut the fuck up, dude. I’m trying to find something real. Sorry. It’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal. Yeah, it kind of is. I know you started the Cher thing, Larry. It’s not even an insult. ‘Cher’, really? She’s a singer, actor, dancer, fashion icon. How is that a fucking insult? I’m fucking out of here with this guy.”

By “Hollywood Elsewhere-styled” I mean the kind of apology in which you say “look, I wasn’t actually wrong for calling you a rancid dick because that’s who and what you are and probably always will be if you don’t get some therapy, but I’m sorry, you know, for the bad vibes…even though it was mostly your fault.”

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll never hesitate to offer a sincere apology when warranted (it’s a mark of true character to be able to express humility and honest regret), but I also love offering the half-assed kind in which you say “sorry but blow me.” When the shoe fits, I mean.

Dry wit and deft allusion are the chief signatures of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, whom I’ve been reading for a quarter-century. No fastballs or croquet mallets, but curves, knuckleballs, sliders. His pans suggest that disdain, anger and even disgust reside within, but Lane is hardly an emotionally open book. He always holds himself in check.

It’s therefore interesting and significant that you can detect serious, unmitigated loathing in his 9.27 review of Joker (“Todd Phillips’ Joker Is No Laughing Matter“). Not just about the film but the hype. Joker, in short, has gotten under his skin. He’s fuming and ready to take a swing. This means something.

“Here’s the deal,” Lane explains. “Joker is not a great leap forward, or a deep dive into our collective unconscious, let alone a work of art. It’s a product. All the pre-launch rumblings, the rants and the raves, testify to a cunning provocation, and, if we yield to it, we’re not joining a debate; we’re offering our services, unpaid, to the marketing department at Warner Bros.

New Yorker illustration by Zohar Lazar.

“When Dalí and Buñuel made L’Âge d’Or (1930), they wanted to start a riot, and they succeeded, but Joker yearns for little more than a hundred op-ed pieces and a firestorm of tweets. With ticket sales, naturally, to match.

“The evidence for this daring scheme is everywhere you look, in Phillips’s film, and everywhere you listen. Nicholson’s Joker may have danced and pranced to the sound of Prince’s ‘Partyman’, but Phoenix gyrates, on a steep flight of steps, to ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2’, a 1972 hit by Gary Glitter. It used to be popular with sports teams, rousing the crowds at N.F.L. and N.H.L. games, before Glitter was convicted, in 1999, of possessing child pornography, and, seven years later, of sexually abusing minors, in Vietnam. Since then, understandably, the song has tumbled out of favor.

“Do you believe that the decision to revive it, for Joker, is anything but a studied choice, nicely crafted to offend? Please. I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade, but I realize, equally, that to vent any inordinate wrath toward it is to fall straight into its trap, for outrage merely proves that our attention has been snagged. Just ask the President of the United States.”

One dispute: In today’s realm, “a firestorm of tweets” is a riot.

HE-posted on 9.29.19:

I don’t eat candy in movie theatres as a rule. I’m strictly a warm-buttered-popcorn-and-coke kind of guy. But if I was forced to eat some kind of candy or else, I would choose Jujyfruits, which is the hottest candy in Pennsylvania right now. Followed by Hot Tamales, Good & Plenty, orange slices and thick red licorice. But I really try and stay away from that shit. Anyone who likes Tootsie Rolls in this day and age has something wrong with them. Ditto Necco Wafers. And to hell with Slurpies — they give me a headache.

There’s no question that Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy, a drama about the infamous Dreyfus case, is a strong, worthwhile film. It won the Silver Lion at last month’s Venice Film Festival. But of course it can’t be theatrically distributed or streamed in the U.S because of Polanski has been cancelled over his late ’70s statutory rape case, as well as a couple of other unsavory allegations left over from the ’70s and ’80s.

HE to distribution pally: How might I some day see An Officer and a Spy (aka J’Accuse) in this country? I realize that the odds are against theatrical distribution because of the wokester #MeToo political climate, but surely someone has the bravery to distribute this film, at the very least on a streaming basis.

A distributor pally suggested that I reach out to the worldwide sales agent, Playtime, and in particular Francois Yon, a Playtime Group partner who presides over Sales & Business Development.

I did so right away, and an hour or two later Francois responded as follows: “Thank you Jeffrey. Maybe you should write about this situation and how the American audiences are being culturally cut out from the rest of the world. It did happen a few times in past American history, so I remain hopeful that [things] will change once the Trump years are behind us.”

HE to Francois: “You’re saying I might have to wait until Trump is out of office before seeing An Officer and a Spy? Seriously? Will there be some way for me to at least stream it from a European company? Can you offer me a private link? I’d really like to see this as I went to Telluride instead of Venice.”

Dear Boys and Girls: Woke Twitter is apparently committed to smearing, belittling and otherwise taking down Todd Phillips‘ Joker (Warner Bros., 10.4). The reaction to Phillips’ quotes in a new Vanity Fair interview, in which he said that SJW Twitter jackals are killing (or have killed) irreverent humor, made that clear. It is axiomatic that if Woke Twitter is trying to denigrate something or someone, the victim of this attack almost certainly has something worth pondering and considering. So this is one more reason to flock to Joker this weekend.

From “Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War,” a 10.1 N.Y. Times story by Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis:

Wiki boilerplate: “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is 2.7.20 Warner Bros. release, based on the DC Comics team Birds of Prey. The film is intended to be the eighth film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) and is directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson. The ensemble cast includes Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco, Ali Wong and Ewan McGregor.

“Birds of Prey follows Harley Quinn as she joins forces with Black Canary, the Huntress, and Renee Montoya to save Cassandra Cain from Gotham City crime lord Black Mask.”

“Six billionaires fake their own deaths and form an elite vigilante squad in order to take down notorious criminals”…bullshit. The Michael Bay stamp is just as toxic as ever — the high-velocity action aesthetic taken to absurd, over-funded, over-amplified heights. Ryan Reynolds needs to keep rolling and knocking, of course, but how does starring in a film like this not lower his basic stock rating? Shot in Italy (Rome, Florence, Siena, Taranto), the UAE (Abu Dhabi, Al Ain) and Hong Kong. I haven’t seen it, but the trailer suggests pure wankery.

Nick Clement (aka “Action Man”): “They’re putting this out DECEMBER 13th!! The insanity of a mega-budget Scorsese and mega-budget Bay coming from the same studio and separated by one month is unprecedented. It looks completely insane/stupid/retarded/amazing. PHOTO-REAL ACTION THAT ACTUALLY LOOKS NEW AND INSPIRED. And the full-deal F-bomb route, like the old days. Because it’s Netflix. And they don’t give a fuck. They gave Bay unlimited freedom to be Bay — can’t wait!!!!”

I’ve watched this day-old video 15 or 20 times now. Why hasn’t the fast-acting hero’s name been reported? This is the kind of thing that John McLane would’ve done if he’d been an airport service guy instead of a flinty renegade cop.