The look of contempt that Poe Dameron gives Kylo Ren at the 33-second mark is perfect. His eyes say three things: (1) “Is this cowboy-hatted dude…whatever he thinks he’s doing is lame”; (2) “Did he used to sing with the Jordinaires?”; (3) “And he’s recording with us?” I laughed at Oscar Isaac‘s disdain when I first saw Inside Llewyn Davis six and a half years ago, and I bought it all over again when I re-watched it last night. A 100% genuine moment, one human being to another. I’m sorry but it sank in more deeply than any single moment in The Rise of Skywalker. Plus the instrumentation sounds extra-great with headphones, especially with the stand-up bass.

Nine films were nominated for 2013 Best Picture Oscar, and Inside Llewyn Davis wasn’t one of them? Seriously? The Best Picture winner, 12 Years A Slave, is a masterpiece, but who re-watches the other eight nominees and to what extent?

I will never, ever watch Gravity again. (Sandra Bullock going “aagghh!” in a haunted house, and space is the ghost.) Nor will I ever watch David O. Russell‘s American Hustle again. (But I’ll watch Silver Linings Playbook any day of the week and twice on Sundays.) Captain Phillips was over-rated. Dallas Buyers Club is a good film — I’d watch it again. Spike Jonze‘s Her is also special, but I haven’t re-viewed. The best thing about Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska was that song, “Their Pie.” Dernsy screwed himself out of an Oscar by insisting that his grouchy old cuss was a Best Actor thang. Inside Llewyn Davis should have been nominated instead of Philomena. Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street is the 2013 Best Picture nominee that people will be re-watching 50 years hence.

Eddie Murphy‘s young, lithe and slender “Mr. Robinson” was hilarious in the early ’80s. But last night’s rebooted version? It’s funny when a 20something wise-ass skips on the rent but less so when an older, paunchy guy does the same thing. Not to mention stealing 72-inch flatscreens from his white-ass neighbors. The “toasting our loving family at Christmas” skit was the best. Buckwheat was funny; Gumby was noteworthy for the following ad-lib: “I’m the one that made that Eddie Murphy a star. He was just a regular coon boy until I saw him.”

Second complaint: The amiable Colin Jost, 37, is a valued SNL comedy writer in addition to his “Weekend Update” anchorship. He’s also moderately good looking, is engaged to Scarlett Johansson, and bunked with Pete Buttigieg at Harvard. But he’s the blandest SNL news reader ever. A confident “Weekend Update” personality just says it — clever is clever whether it gets a huge laugh or not. But Jost always seems to wait for audience approval, and then glows with contentment when he gets it. Plus his undercut (aka “Hitler youth”) is unflattering. Some of Jost’s forebears had the requisite impudence — Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Norm Macdonald, Seth Myers, etc. Yes, I know — Uproxx’s Steven Hyden posted a riff along these lines last April (“Why Does Everyone (Still) Hate SNL’s Colin Jost?“).

…and the horror horn. Snapped at a party in Cannes in, like, ‘05 or thereabouts. The whole idea of warning viewers of Chamber of Horrors that something heavy was about to happen was, of course, on the face of it, absurd for obvious reasons. 98% of the readership has neither heard of nor cares about this dumb film. Nor should they.

What would you call Janet Maslin‘s observation that straight guys aren’t exactly pining to see Little Women? I would describe it as somewhere between unsurprising and “no shit, Sherlock.” It was obvious from the get-go that Greta Gerwig’s adaptation was aimed at women of whatever age bracket. When Tatyana saw it she said, “This is not a movie for everyone…only certain people.” (Or words to that effect.) I would never tell a friend not to see Little Women (it’s a smart, well-composed, grade-A effort), but there’s no way to make a case for it being even close to the best of the year. HE’s current list starts with The Irishman, 1917, The Lighthouse, Les Miserables, Joker, Bombshell, etc.

I’ve told this story two or three times, but sometime in the late winter or early spring of ’83 I flew from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview, and during the visit I went out to Universal studios to poke around. I wound up climbing a chain-link fence and walking onto a sound stage where, lo and behold, Scarface was being shot. The huge set contained a portion of Tony Montana‘s Miami mansion — the upstairs office, the red-carpeted foyer and staircase, a portion of the white-painted exterior with royal palm trees outside.

Hanging on a wall near the base of the staircase was a fairly large (at least six or seven feet tall) oil portrait of Al Pacino‘s Tony and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Elvira Hancock. I’m no authority on oil portraits, but it looked like an absolutely first-rate effort. Someone had taken the time to make it look like a serious artist (one who knew from color and shadow and subtle gradations) had worked on it. In the film the painting is seen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that.

I’ve long wondered what happened to this grand portrait. Did Brian DePalma or [the late] producer Marty Bregman make off with it? Online you can buy cheap knockoff versions with bullet holes, but the real thing was quite impressive.

The real-deal, full-size portrait presented a somewhat darker image that the one you see here.

Gina McIntyre has penned a 12.21 L.A. Times piece called “For Filmmakers This season, It’s Hip To Be Square — At Least On The Screen.” The primary focus is on Robert Eggers‘ black-and-white The Lighthouse (Amazon, currently streaming), which Eggers shot “using an aspect ratio dating [back] to the days of silent movies.”

Which is true. 1.19:1 was used during the transitional period when the film industry was converting to sound, or roughly from 1926 to 1932. Pally who knows everything: “It’s from the very early sound era with the soundtrack on the left, before Academy added the printed-in-frame lines to create 1.37.”

The problem is that McIntyre declares that the square-ish format “is known in cinematography circles as 1.3:1 or 4:3.” Sorry but that’s wrong. The Lighthouse aspect ratio, as A24 informed me and as I reported on 7.30, “is actually 1.19:1” — an aspect ratio introduced in 1926. Call it 1.2:1 if you want to simplify, but 4×3 (or 1.33 or 1.37) is definitely incorrect. Variety‘s Jazz Tanquay confirmed the 1.19 aspect ratio on 11.18.19.

Spoiler alluded to: I’m not an Apple TV subscriber, and I haven’t been watching the last few episodes of The Morning Show after streaming the first three episodes via a special press link. But episode #10, the first season finale, aired last night, and a certain principal character (and in particular a victim of sexual assault by Steve Carell‘s Mitch Kessler character, who is more or less based upon Matt Lauer) turned up dead.

The cause of death isn’t murder and it isn’t necessarily a suicide (or so says the actor playing the deceased), but the tragedy certainly brings the full weight of #MeToo reflection down upon viewers. Or so I’ve been reading. Who saw it and what’s your reaction?

The night before last (12.19) a special 20th anniversary screening of Michael Mann‘s The Insider happened at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles. This followed an identical event that happened at the Museum of Modern Art on 11.1. Usually such screenings serve as a promotional bounce for a forthcoming remastered Bluray (like a 4K version), but I’m not aware of any such plan for The Insider. A standard 1080p Bluray, the yield of “a new digital restoration”, was released by Touchstone Video on 2.19.13.

Most Mann-ophiles will insist that Heat is his grandest film, but I honestly find The Insider a better effort in nearly every regard — more exacting, complex, subtle, layered, intelligent. And certainly more real world. And without any annoying Waingro problems. No downtown LA shoot-out and no legendary Pacino-DeNiro conversation at Kate Mantilini’s, but The Insider is all adults, all hotels and corporate offices, all the time.

And with so many great Pacino moments (and not just the usual howling rants)! Not to mention one of the greatest Christopher Plummer performances of all time. Not to mention the absolute highlight of Bruce McGill‘s film career — “Wipe that smirk off your face!”

F.X. Feeney: “I’d admired Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans and Heat as individual films — but it was watching Mann penetrate the contemporary world of corporate authority, in which matters of life and death are decided over desks and behind closed doors, that the living totality and cumulative value of his filmography became unmistakable, and a source of abiding amazement.”

Two decades later I remain astonished by how Touchstone marketing failed to convey the simple fact that The Insider isn’t about the evils of tobacco, but about the glory (and the enormous difficulty) of good journalism vs. the evils of corporatism, and specifically about CBS corporate diluting a major 1995 60 Minutes story about big tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand.

Lewis Beale has tapped out a 12.20 L.A Times piece about whistleblower films, particularly Todd Haynes‘ Dark Waters and Scott Z. Burns‘ The Report.

Beale’s boilerplate definition: “A single person or small, seemingly powerless groups fighting against great odds to uncover the truth about governmental or corporate malfeasance. Some are classic whistleblowers, who report on wrongdoings within their own organizations; others are just concerned citizens who see wrongdoing and take up the fight against it.”

Beale mentions a few storied whistleblower dramas — Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Serpico, Erin Brockovich, The Insider — but omits any mention of Steven Soderbergh‘s wiggy and eccentric The Informant! (which Burns wrote) and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth, a whistleblower saga that blew up and went south, resulting in everyone washing their hands of it.

HE to Beale: And not a single mention of the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower saga, and the movie that will eventually but surely come of that down the road?

You saw The Report, I take it. Talk about an oppressively smug procedural, brandishing an ethical merit badge on its chest. I for one found Annette Bening‘s Dianne Feinstein…well, they got the wig right. No nation should embrace, much less be proud of, torturing its enemies, but the anti-torture lefties were the ones who attacked Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which is somewhere between 17 and 18 times better than The Report. A measure of irony there.

I was 100% down with Dark Waters until the end, when we’re told that the chemical corporates (Dupont) are going to dispute each and every individual case. They’re going to spend the plaintiffs to death. Then Dupont and the plaintiffs agree on an overall settlement for what seems like a formidable amount, but when you break it down…did the plaintiffs really feel restored with all the death and disease they had to cope with?

I’m sorry but Dark Waters doesn’t seem to end right. It feels overly mitigated. It left me feeling vaguely deflated and downish. I respected and admired, but it doesn’t do the movie-movie-thing very well. The attention to specifics is engrossing and even stirring, and the acting is aces up and down. It’s not that I was looking for an artificial sugar-high ending, but the finale that Haynes and producer/star Mark Ruffalo went with doesn’t feel like the one you wanted to see.

Anyone who claims that a presidential candidate doesn’t need to persuade millionaires and billionaires to write checks after hustling them in this or that pricey environment (yachts, wine caves, five-star restaurants, what-have-you) is flat-out lying. Yes, you can go the Bernie Sanders route and depend entirely on individual, small-level donations, but Kamala Harris is out of the race because she couldn’t keep her campaign financially afloat. The fact that Pete Buttigieg out-hustled her makes him a bad guy? Barack Obama didn’t finance his ’08 and ’12 presidential campaigns with money from wealthy supporters? Democratic purity derangement syndrome is one of the things Average Joes can’t stand about lefties.

Signed, sealed, delivered, done — Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin for Best Actress. Unless, you know, Respect (United Artists, 10.9) turns out to be on the same level as Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet and is more or less dismissed. But if it turns out to be even half-decent, Hudson is a lock — Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles all over again.

Directed by Liesl Tommy, Respect will presumably include a depiction of how the recording of “I’ve Never Loved A Man” came together at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals recording studio. The savior was session man Spooner Oldham, who came up with the Wurlitzer riff that made that song work from the get-go.

If Respect doesn’t have this scene, forget it. The episode was passed along in Magnolia Pictures’ Muscle Shoals, a 2013 documentary.

Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill (Fox Searchlight, 2.14.20) is an English-language remake of Ruben Ostlund‘s Force Majeure (’14). The Downhill trailer suggests that while the feature has been slightly massaged to allow for a dab or two of humor, it’s almost an exact copy of the original.

Ostlund’s film basically asks “who are we deep down?” It suggests that some of the noble qualities we all try to project aren’t necessarily there.

The inciting incident is a massive, fast-approaching snowslide that threatens to bury several vacationers sitting on an outdoor terrace at a pricey ski resort, and specifically a husband and father named Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) who succumbs to instinct and decides to run for his life as the wall approaches.

After the danger passes wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) resents what she regards as Tomas’s cowardice and betrayal. Tomas should have either (a) embraced her and their two kids and hunkered down in the hope that the landslide wouldn’t smother and kill them, or (b) quickly leapt to his feet, grabbed her and the kids and yanked them all from their seats and into the relative safety of the resort’s interior. Or…you know, something other than just try to save his own terrified ass.

Will Ferrell plays the chickenshit dad; Julia Louis Dreyfuss plays the resentful wife.

HE viewpoint: Blind instinct tends to rule when a person feels threatened by imminent death. Most of us would hightail it when a mountain of snow is approaching, I think. Any guy who says “in this horrible situation I would hug my wife and kids in the last few seconds we have before being smothered to death”…anyone who insists they would not try to escape suffocation is almost certainly lying.

You can bet that if I were, say, ten years old and I saw an avalanche coming while sitting outdoors with my dad, mom, sister and brother, I would definitely run for cover. Dads aren’t expected to do this, I realize, but human nature is human nature.