According to recent (6.21 through 6.24) Emerson Polling national survey, Mayor Pete beats Donald Trump by 52% to 48% — margin of error 2.9% plus or minus,

At a recent Planned Parenthood convention in South Carolina, “several groups of chanting supporters marched their candidates into the auditorium. On Saturday morning, Kamala Harris came down an escalator accompanied by a cheering throng and a high school drum line. Later, boisterous backers of Cory Booker streamed in behind him from one end of the convention center, only to meet dozens of raucous Beto O’Rourke fans coming from the other. They came together in the middle, attempting to drown each other out with chants like rival gangs in a good-natured musical.

“Shortly after that, a group of Joe Biden supporters gathered to march into the main hall. Biden wasn’t with them, but they planned to enter as he appeared onstage. There were 20 or 30 people, a smaller group than those accompanying Harris, Booker or O’Rourke, and despite a few earnest woo-hoos, they weren’t nearly as loud as the others.

“An ability to draw crowds isn’t everything — a tepid vote counts the same as a passionate one. Biden’s supporters are older than those of other Democrats, which gives his campaign less visible energy but a more reliable voting base. Still, as recent elections have shown, enthusiasm matters. Anyone convinced that Biden is the safe choice should go see him for themselves.” — from Michelle Goldberg‘s “Joe Biden Doesn’t Look So Electable in Person,” posted on 6.24.19.

…the industry takes note. But this sounds a bit curious. Everything I’ve heard and read about James Gray‘s Ad Astra (Disney/Fox, 9.20), a father-son, space-travel, Heart of Darkness-like drama with Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, has indicated it’s a hard-luck project. Gray wanted it to go to Cannes, but the FX couldn’t be finished in time. The release date was bumped twice (slated for 1.11.19 and then 5.24.19). Remember that for a film of this scope (space adventure, other realms and universes, etc.), $50 million is a nickle-and-dime budget. So what is it that Tapley has heard about Ad Astra? Specifically, I mean. What’s special about it, what stands out? It’s not enough to say “whoa, I’m very excited!” If you’ve heard something solid, great — pass it along. If you haven’t heard any specifics or don’t want to share them, stand down.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is allegedly in big trouble with African American voters (not just in South Bend but all over) because he didn’t personally step into the 6.16 confrontation between South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill and the late Eric J. Logan. Or because he’s had the temerity to run for President and therefore wasn’t home in South Bend where he should have been at the time of the shooting.

The O’Neill-Logan shooting happened around 3 am, which suggests that if Buttigieg had been in South Bend he probably would have been home sleeping. Nonetheless, the African-American community mantra is “dilletante Mayor Pete has to face the music!”

O’Neill’s account of the shooting of Logan is admittedly curious. Logan, who apparently had been breaking into cars, either came at O’Neill with a knife or “threw” it at him. What kind of a drooling idiot threatens a cop with a knife when the cop is holding a loaded gun and saying “drop it!”? It’s obviously problematic that O’Neill didn’t turn on his bodycam, and so the African American community is assuming O’Neill is flat-out lying, and that he may have plugged Logan without reasonable cause.

But I’ve also read that (a) today’s high-end bodycams can be automatically activated when a police offer removes his/her weapon from his/her holster, and that (b) South Bend chose instead to purchase manually-operated bodycams, which are cheaper.

I know I’m just a typically smug and clueless white guy sitting in West Hollywood, but how likely is it that a 19-year veteran of a big-city police force who rose in the ranks…hired in 2000, promoted to sergeant in 2015…how likely is it that O’Neill would just shoot Logan in cold blood? It’s possible, sure, but how likely?

A 6.18 account of the incident by South Bend Tribune reporters Greg Swiercz and Christian Sheckler states the following:

(a) “Investigators…found six vehicles [that] had been broken into — two on William [Street], two on Taylor Street and two in the Central High parking lot. A purse, a wallet and a knife — the same knife that was found at the scene of the shooting — were stolen from the various vehicles, according to South Bend prosecutor Ken Cotter .”

(b) Cotter and Metro Homicide commander Michael Grzegorek said that “shortly after O’Neill drove into the Central High Apartments parking lot, he saw a person’s legs sticking out of a Honda Civic. O’Neill stopped his cruiser, stepped out and asked the man if the car was his. The man said ‘yes’ but O’Neill spotted a purse wedged in his clothing. The man then emerged from the car with knife in his right hand.”

(c) “Logan is said to have ignored multiple orders to ‘drop the knife’ and then approached O’Neill with the knife raised. O’Neill, backing up toward his vehicle, fired two shots. One shot struck Logan in the right side of his abdomen, while the other struck the opened door of the car. Logan ‘was coming toward (O’Neill) at roughly the same speed that Sgt. O’Neill was retreating,’ Cotter said.”

It’s not a rumor: Ari Aster‘s Midsommar (A24, 7.3) is brilliantly made right up until the final 15 or 20 minutes, which don’t quite work. But this doesn’t matter, or certainly shouldn’t. Because Aster, born 31 or 32 years ago, is such a gifted and masterful filmmaker. He’s way, way up there, and I don’t want to hear any dissenting bullshit about this.

Midsommar is a 100% essential summer freakout flick no matter how you feel about elevated horror, chilling Swedish pagan rituals, shitty boyfriends or Florence Pugh. The 23 year-old actress (recently in The Outlaw King and The Little Drummer Girl) is quite good in the lead role of Dani, a 20something who’s recently been devastated by a ghastly family trauma and by the less-than-fully-engaged, close to aloof vibes she’s been getting from her brooding boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor).

Yes, Midsommar is a breakup film — David Edelstein called it “a woman’s fantasy of revenge against a man who didn’t meet her emotional needs” as well as “a male director’s masochistic fantasy of emasculation at the hands of a matriarchal cult.” That’s about as concise and on-target as a capsule description could be.

Downmarket meat-and-potatoes horror fans will probably speak ill of Midsommar, as they did to some extent about Aster’s Hereditary. But if watching a sublimely creepy (and even occasionally hilarious) film made by a phenomenally talented craftsman means anything to you, you simply have no choice in the matter — you have to see this puppy, and I mean the first weekend. Aster is so good, so sharp, so fully in command.

Did I read somewhere that he’s declared that Midsommar is his last horror film (at least for a while)? Whether Aster said it or not, it’s a very smart decision. No exaggeration, Aster is Martin Scorsese, Ruben Ostlund, Alfred Hitchcock, David Fincher and Val Lewton rolled into one. He’s way too genius-level (and I mean better than Tarantino) to plant his flag in the realm of a single genre.

I caught Midsommar at Monday night’s Arclight premiere, and then attended the after-party at No Vacancy (1727 No. Hudson).

Midsommar director-writer Ari Aster (l.) and Eighth Grade direcot Bo Burnham (photo stolen from Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson).

I want credit for lasting 161 minutes with Carlos Reygadas‘ Our Time. Yes, I missed the last 13 minutes but it’s not a problem, trust me. It’s one of those interesting, real but vaguely un-real art films that make you feel glad you’ve seen the good parts, if not altogether nourished by the whole.

It’s also one of those pain-in-the-ass adult relationship films that you know will never end in a just-right way. It just goes on and on and on and on. But it’s definitely “good” for the portions that turn your head around.

It will irritate you, try your patience, make you exhale loudly and throw up your hands. But at the end of the day you’ll be half-grateful you saw it (or at least saw as much as you could endure).

If Our Time had ended at 100 minutes, I would have been fine with that. 120 minutes would have been pushing it, but I could’ve handled it. 150 minutes would have been too much. But 174 minutes? That’s why I bailed at 161.

During the last 35 or 40 minutes (or rather the last 35 or 40 that I saw) there were five or six scenes that could have worked as a servicable finale. In particular there’s a moment when the lead fellow, Juan (played by Reygadas, who also directed and wrote), breaks down while visiting a friend dying of cancer. He’s not crying about the friend but the end of his marriage, or more precisely the end of his ability (and his wife’s ability) to amiably or constructively accept the terms of an open marriage. The weeping-at-the-deathbed ending would’ve been perfect.

Juan and Esther (Natalia Lopez, a renowned film editor and Reyadas’ real-life wife) run a bull ranch in the rugged, mostly treeless Mexican countryside (near the town of Tlaxcala, about an hour east of Mexico City).

And it’s a parched, somewhat muddy property, let me tell you. It ain’t Switzerland or southern Austria in the springtime, I can tell you that. “Later”, I was muttering to myself. Especially after a scene in which a “wild” bull gores a donkey and spills his intestines all over the ground. Yeah, it’s a metaphor but still.

Esther is in charge of running the day-to-day while Juan, a famous poet, raises and selects the horned beasts. They have some kids, and a no-secrets open marriage.

The problem is that Esther has embarked upon a secretive affair with a bearded, laid-back, bordering-on-fat horse trainer named Phil (Phil Burgers), and Juan starts freaking about her lack of openness and general sneaking around, which tells him it isn’t just a recreational affair but something a bit more than that.

I’ll tell you what Our Time left me with. It left me with an idea that if you’re going to cat around outside the bonds of marriage (which I wouldn’t recommend by the way), old-fashioned cheating is the way to go. Lie your ass off, invent elaborate fictions and try to pull the wool over your significant other’s eyes the way all those suburban John Updike characters attempted back in the ’60s.

Cheaters get busted sooner or later anyway and it all comes out in the wash so you might as well enjoy the hot sex while it lasts. There’s nothing like betraying your wife or husband the old-fashioned way.

My point is that anything is better than the jaded terms of an “open” marriage. Remember Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage? Nothing but misery and rage.

A guy who sometimes hears about research screenings wrote the following early today: “I’ve heard the same good things about The Aeronauts (Amazon, 10.25). Easy slamdunk Oscar contender. An undeniable hit. Visually staggering vintage adventure with impressive and tense set pieces.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Sometime around ’92 or ’93 I had a brief chat with brilliant Steve Allen, whom I’d long worshipped for his ’50s and ’60s hot streak as the original Tonight Show host (’54 to ’56 — three years), the Sunday night Steve Allen Show on NBC, and the Hollywood-based, Westinghouse-produced Steve Allen Show.

Not to mention his having written more than 50 books plus his prowess as a composer- songwriter (over 8000 tunes). Easily the brightest guy of that generation (i.e., my dad’s) I’d ever spoken to.

My face-time session happened at the House of Blues. We only spoke for 15 minutes or so, but it was electric. (For me at least.). As I was thanking him and saying farewell I cried “smock! smock!” Allen laughed, patted me on the shoulder.

70-plus years ago director Joseph Losey teamed with producer Dore Schary on a thoughtful antiwar drama called The Boy With Green Hair (’48). Which no one mentions today, not even in passing. But it was a touching little film about tolerance and nonconformity. Anyone who saw it as a kid was probably affected by its message about compassion, humanism, and resisting the mainstream.

11 year-old Dean Stockwell played a war orphan named Peter who lives with a kindly, gray-haired grandpa who’s adopted him (Pat O’Brien, who was only 49 when the film was shot — by today’s standards he looks like a guy in the mid 70s). One day Pete wakes up with shamrock green hair, which of course results in all kinds of hateful, fearful behavior on the part of school kids as well as their parents and everyone else.

Peter’s hair turns out to be a kind of metaphor for innocent victims of war carnage. Under considerable pressure Peter is persuaded to shave his head, but when he actually submits to the barber…well, it’s heartbreaking.

The Boy With Green Hair was a huge money loser — it cost just under a million to make, and would up $420,000 in the red. You can’t stream it. The only way to watch Losey’s film is to buy the DVD or watch the YouTube version, which looks atrocious.

Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt‘s screenplay was based upon a same-titled 1946 short story by Betsy Beaton.

The costarring cast include Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale (Perry Mason‘s Della Street), Dwayne Hickman (Dobie Gillis) and the uncredited Dale Robertson and Russ Tamblyn.

Will someone please explain what it is that Mayor Pete did or failed to do in response to the recent South Bend police shooting of Eric Logan?

There have been so many seemingly racist shootings in this country that when a black guy is plugged by the bulls, it’s automatically presumed that racist attitudes and a failure of the cops to show proper restraint are the main reasons. There’s no other reaction that people are willing to entertain these days. Black dude = innocent. White cops = Satan’s spawn. White mayor = can’t be trusted.

And so Mayor Pete got yelled at by protestors earlier today because…this is what I don’t understand. Was it because he’s not African-American and therefore can’t understand or empathize? The South Bend protestors appeared to doubt Pete’s sincerity in trying to address and correct the situation. They suspected his main motive in returning to South Bend was because he’s running for President. But what is it that he failed to do exactly?

Mayor Pete’s “error”, apparently, was failing to immediately fire or suspend the police officers involved in the shooting.

According to a N.Y. Times report, Buttigieg “responded point by point to ten protestor demands, agreeing to some — such as requesting the Department of Justice appoint an outside prosecutor — and coolly explaining reasons for rejecting others. ‘The first demand concerns the firing of police officers,’ he said. ‘The laws of the state are…that’s decided by a board of safety.'”

N.Y. Times: “Logan, 54, was fatally shot by an officer responding to reports of a man breaking into cars downtown. The authorities said Logan flashed a knife and lunged at the officer, who shot him once in the abdomen. But the officer had not activated his body camera. [Plus] Logan’s family questioned why he was taken to the hospital in a police car rather than an ambulance.”

Low-information black voters were already cool to Pete, according to polls. Too measured, too cerebral for them. They also didn’t like Bernie in ’16. Just not their kind of candidate. They apparently only like Uncle Joe and Kamala.

For this Joni Mitchell excerpt alone (i.e., playing an early version of “Coyote” with Roger McGuinn looking on and accompaniment from a certain guy with a hat), Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is more than worth the price.

Every moment in life is unique — happened precisely that way, that one time and only once. So great this was captured. Everything turns into mist.