Imagine if Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.20) had stuck to the original scheme by focusing on unambiguous, straight-ahead, white-guy FBI fortitude, and if the ads had used an image of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Tom White, the guy who headed up the Osage Murders investigation back in the 1920s…

Imagine if the Flower Moon one-sheet had mimicked the ads for Mervyn Leroy‘s The FBI Story with Dicaprio wearing the hat and firing the pistol instead of James Stewart…

Better still, imagine if Scorsese and Apple marketers had decided to (ironically?) re-use Max Steiner‘s main-title music from The FBI Story.

You can laugh if you want, but a “heroic FBI!…hooray for Leo and his team!” approach to this story would, I suspect, connect better with Joe and Jane Popcorn than the melancholy Native American guilt trip that the movie actually is…an approach that has, by the way, no particular point of view. It just catalogues what happened.

I’m imagining this because the original conception of Killers would have starred DiCaprio as Tom White. When Scorcese and screenwriter Eric Roth decided their adaptation of David Grann‘s non-fiction book needed a woke rewrite, Dicaprio decided to play yokel bad guy Ernest Burkhart while Jesse Plemons was tapped to play White.

Posted on 9.12.23: In a 9.12 Time cover story by Stephanie Zacharek, Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has confirmed what costar Lily Gladstone told Variety‘s Zack Sharf nine months ago, which was that Flower Moon, a sprawling crime epic about the FBI’s investigation of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, was given a woke rewrite — one that de-emphasized the FBI nailing the bad guys and emphasized the perspective of Osage Nation and the pain their community had endured.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese tells Zacharek. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

In a 1.20.23 article, Gladstone explained to Sharf, Variety‘s resident wokester lobbyist and spokesperson, that Scorsese had basically re-thought the 1920s saga, which had begun as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story.

What if, God forbid, President Joe Biden experiences a Mitch McConnell freeze-up this year or next? Or, God forbid, falls off a bandstand like Bob Dole did at the relatively young age of 73? You think something in this realm won’t happen? If Biden wins re-election he’ll finish his second term at age 86. He’s a good capable man in relatively good shape for an 80-year-old, but we know what’s almost certainly coming.

Biden can barely handle himself now in interviews, and a day-old Axios piece reported that amid concerns about his age, Biden’s team is on a “don’t-let-him-trip mission.” And his second term, if he wins, won’t even begin for another 16 months, and it will end on 1.20.29. You think Joe’s going to…what, reverse the natural process and be in better shape when he takes the oath of office on 1.20.25?

Many of us with older parents know what coping with final-stage aging entails. At age 82 or 83 my father (who died in ’08) fell in his living room, hit his head on a coffee table and cut his upper lip all to hell. I visited a couple of days later and he was scowling and infuriated. Coping with body failure (primarily balance, not to mention Depends) is brutal.

It would be one thing if Biden was 65…fine. Or even Dole’s age during the ’96 campaign, but he’s seven years beyond that. Reality is knocking on everyone’s door right now, and most Democrats are going “oh, he’s fine and if he dies Kamala Harris will be a great president.” Good God!

Donald Trump is finished as a businessman in New York State, and he’s looking at a likely fine of $250 million when it’s all over. He’ll probably be forced to sell off key properties. Not to mention his astronomical legal costs regarding the numerous indictments, etc.

Remember mumblecore? I’m kidding — of course we remember. But there’s an entire generation out there (Zoomers) that has never heard of it and certainly isn’t interested in knowing or asking questions or anything, and are content to just sit on their couches and inhale streaming content. I can’t believe the world has turned out as it has.

Does anyone remember Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, which is now 13 and 1/3 years old? Six years ago in Cannes I asked Baumbach about Greenberg and even he barely remembered it. Well, he remembered it but he didn’t really want to talk much about it because it was a huge bomb and because it pissed some people off.

I watched it again, and it’s still one of most daring, balls-to-the-wall, character-driven films I’ve ever seen or laughed with.

On 4.3.10 I posted a piece called “Big Greenberg Divide.” Key passage: “Greenberg is about what a lot of 30ish and 40ish X-factor people who wanted to achieve fame and fortune but didn’t quite make it or dropped the ball after a short burst…it’s about what these people are going through, or will go through. It’s dryly amusing at times, but it’s not kidding around.”

The second half of the article was a Greenberg defense written by HE correspondent “Famous Mortimer”:

“I think it is provoking such strong levels of resentment from viewers because it is a movie very much of these times but not made in the style of these times. It exposes the toxic levels of conceitedness and alienation today with the sincerity and empathy of ’70’s films by Ashby, Altman and Allen.

“First off, it’s a story about people. There is no high concept or shoehorned stake-raising set piece. Viewers either have the patience to connect with the human pain on display or they are lost. Unlike Sideways, there is no charming countryside setting or buddy comedy hijinks to punch up the mood.

“Second, the dialogue is the action. Only when the viewer is willing to think over the dialogue will characters’ seemingly ambiguous motivations and back-stories become clear. There’s no juicy monologue or nauseating flashback to convey these points. Instead, the viewer comes upon them over the course of the film in the form of passing references made by various characters. It is up to us to take these bits and pieces together and unlock the character revelations for ourselves. No more spoon-feeding cinema.

“Third, this film is a labor of love. That means idiosyncratic details are to be found at every level of its making. Only by thinking these details over and feeling the connections between them do we appreciate what the movie is trying to do. It’s a really thoughtful and heartfelt experience.”

Imagine if a straight white male had directed May December (Netflix, 11.17), a movie about a Savannah-residing, May-December couple (Julianne Moore, Charles Melton) and the arrival of a famous actress (Natalie Portman) who will soon be portraying Moore in a film about the couple’s scandalous history.

The couple is based, of course, upon the notorious Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, who began a sexual relationship in 1996 when Letourneau, a grade-school teacher, was 34, and Fualaau, one of her sixth-grade students, was 12. Letourneau did a seven-year stretch for the rape of a minor (1998 to 2004).

They were married in May 2005 when Letourneau was 43 and Fualaau was 22. The marriage lasted 14 years until their separation in 2019. Letourneau died of cancer the following year, at age 58.

May December concerns the long-term outcome of a relationship that began under diseased circumstances — i.e., the sexual grooming of a lad by a woman 22 years his senior. Has anyone said boo about the icky aspects since the film premiered in Cannes last May? They have not.

Imagine if May December was about a gray-haired actor paying an extended visit with a Woody Allen-ish director in his mid 80s along with the director’s wife, a 50ish Asian woman. As with May December, the actor would have been signed to portray this Allen-like director in a film, and his goal would be to learn as much as he can about the beginnings of their relationship in the early ’90s and how they’ve dealt with the public condemnation that resulted from some quarters.

Do you think if Manohla Dargis were to review such a film that she would cream in her slacks like she did when she saw May December four months ago?

[Initially posted on 7.16.15] This may not pass muster with traditional Western devotees (i.e, readers of Cowboys & Indians) but arguably one of the most influential westerns ever made is Johnny Concho (’56), a stagey, all-but-forgotten little film that Frank Sinatra starred in and co-produced. For this modest black-and-white enterprise was the first morally revisionist western in which a big star played an ethically challenged lead character — i.e., a cowardly bad guy.

The conventional line is that Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks was the first western in which a major star played a gunslinging outlaw that the audience was invited to identify or sympathize with — a revenge-driven bank robber looking to even the score with an ex-partner (Karl Malden‘s “Dad” Longworth) who ran away and left Brando’s “Rio” to be arrested and sent to prison.

This opened the door, many have noted, to Paul Newman‘s rakishly charming but reprehensible Hud Bannon in Martin Ritt‘s Hud two years later, and then the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (beginning with ’64’s A Fistful of Dollars) and particularly Clint Eastwood‘s “Man With No Name.”

But before One-Eyed Jacks audiences were presented with at least three morally flawed western leads portrayed by name-brand actors. First out of the gate was Sinatra’s’s arrogant younger brother of a notorious gunslinger in Concho. This was followed in ’57 by Glenn Ford‘s Ben Wade, a charmingly sociopathic gang-leader and thief, in Delmer Daves‘ 3:10 to Yuma. And then Paul Newman‘s Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn‘s The Left-Handed Gun (’58).

Oscar Poker urgency — Jeff and Sasha lamenting the Biden 2024 campaign situation & the suppression of Woody’s Coup de Chance, plus handicapping Hottest Best Actor & Actress Contenders, urging on Sunday’s Maher+ Carville kick–around, etc.

Here’s the link, man…go for it.