…the conspiracy crowd always rushes in and sets up house. Earlier today a retweet by President Trump indicated that he, too, thinks something probably stinks in Denmark. Is it possible that the decision to take Jeffrey Epstein off suicide watch was a matter of simple stupidity and/or incompetence? Yes, I suppose. But highly unlikely.

No one in the left or right conspiracy camp will ever believe that Epstein wasn’t “allowed” in some bumbling bureaucratic way to take his life. Many super-wealthy types (including the Clintons) are breathing easy today, but the first order of business should be the prison cell video. If Epstein offed himself without assistance (as most believe), this was almost certainly captured on security cam. If it turns out the cell camera wasn’t working or had been turned off…c’mon!

N.Y. Times reporter Ali Watkins writes that after attempting suicide on 7.23, Epstein “was placed on suicide watch and received daily psychiatric evaluations, a person familiar with his detention said. But just six days later, on July 29, Mr. Epstein, 66, was taken off the watch for reasons that remained unclear on Saturday, the person said.”

The decision to yank The Hunt wasn’t unexpected. In the wake of last weekend’s mass murders and in view of the exacerbated cultural divide, public showings might have prompted volatile reactions…who knows?

Four days ago THR‘s Kim Masters reported that Universal was having second thoughts. Now it’ll leave the room and reappear on the streaming apps sometime next year, most likely. Craig Zobel, Jason Blum and Damon Lindelof‘s dark satire probably would’ve underperformed anyway — it didn’t look all that appealing. It’s just unfortunate that Universal made the call a day after President Trump complained about it (i.e., “Hollywood is really terrible…they’re treating conservatives very unfairly”).

CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, broadcast yesterday:

Asked last night which Democratic candidate President Trump “should fear the most”, former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci (whom I understand because he’s from the tristate area and is basically a Martin Scorsese character) said the following:

“I would be going younger with somebody like Senator Harris or Mayor Pete Buttigieg. And I think that contrast…go out there and speak to the people Trump won last time, don’t call ’em deplorable or white nationalist…go out there and ask what’s wrong with their economic situation…and boy, that would be very powerful. The Democrats, in my opinion, always do better when they go with somebody below the age of 50…Barack Obama, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton.”

“This is the new trick in Democratic politics. Dig up something your opponent said decades ago that looks bad by today’s standards, and pretend that [this is] mike-drop evidence of your awesome moral superiority. [But] humans evolve, and people need to stop pretending that if they were alive back then, they wouldn’t have been the same asshole as everyone else. Yes, you would. You would’ve driven without seat belts and drank when you were pregnant and hit your kids and hit your neighbor’s kids….they did that shit!

“Because woke-sight is not 20/20, and you don’t have ESPCP — Extra Sensory Politically Correct Perception. And if you were around in the 1780s and were rich and white, you likely would have had slaves. The first abolitionist society in American was founded in 1775, and it had 24 members. 24 people in the whole country thought slavery was wrong in the year before we declared independence. Stop being surprised [that] we used to be dumber than we are now. The humans of tomorrow will be horrified by us. You’re not morally better than your grandparents — you just came later. You’re just the next upgrade. You’re the iPhone 11.”

On a personal evolutionary note: People who’ve at least tried to bring clarity and moderation into their lives (i.e., those not enslaved by drugs, booze, cigarettes or some other malicious addiction) tend to evolve in itty-bitty increments. Gentler or more tolerant attitudes tend to prevail as we get older, rough edges tend to get sanded off, wisdom accrues drop by drop. And if you become sober **, it’s fair and reasonable to infer that inch by inch things will slowly evolve in a slightly better direction.

Billionaire pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein killed himself last night inside NYC’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. He reportedly hanged himself. He had tried to do the same thing a couple of weeks ago, and this time he got it done.

Everyone, of course, is thinking variations of the same thought — fine, an apt conclusion, just desserts, ever thus to monsters who prey upon children.

Every act of suicide is, of course, a statement about where a person was at before committing the deed. There are two logical inferences that could be drawn from Epstein’s death — one semi-human and one slightly less so.

The semi-human statement that Epstein might have made last night was “I have been a vile serpent and I know it, and this is my way of saying to the world and my accusers and especially my victims that I agree with you, and that there’s nothing I can do or say to mitigate the ugly, and so I’m executing myself.” The slightly less human statement, if applicable, was “my life is over, and as much as the world believes that I deserve to endure penal degradation for the rest of my life and without offering comment about my obvious guilt, I’m simply not doing to do that…strangulation by bedsheet is better than 20 or 30 years in the slam.”

I suspect that Epstein’s motive was probably a combination of the two.

The conspiracy theorists seem to be saying that the guards charged with enforcing an Epstein suicide watch were paid to take a coffee break or otherwise look the other way. Maybe.

Well, it’s not really an “Oscar Poker” because it doesn’t have the music intro that Sasha Stone used to record and attach, but it’ll do.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy and I decided to assess the current Best Picture spitballs, as listed on Gold Derby — The Irishman (“Made more by the guy who made Silence than the guy who made Goodfellas“), Marriage Story, 1917, Judy, Once Upon A Time Hollywood, Little Women, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Farewell, The Lighthouse, JoJo Rabbit.

Footnote #1: The Irishman will run about three hours, I was told earlier today.

Footnote #2: Early in the discussion I mentioned that I wasn’t aware of any Les Miserables screenings at any of the big early-fall festivals. An hour or two later I learned that Ladj Ly‘s film will play at the Toronto Film Festival.

Again, the mp3.

[Ignore bright blue hyperlinks — something got into one of my laptops.]

Starting at 1:25:

I’m told that Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables, a gripping cops vs. street kids drama set in contempo Paris and easilly the most intense, high-throttle film shown during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, will screen during the forthcoming Toronto Film Festival.

But I wish this Amazon film would also screen at the Telluride and New York film festivals, which would allow Hollywood Elsewhere to catch it a second time without breaking stride.

I was a huge fan in Cannes along with everyone else. It’s certainly among the year’s best, and it ought to be the official French nominee for Best Foreign Language Feature.

“Explosive, urgent, furious, riveting, breathless, impactful” — nearly everyone went apeshit when it screened in Cannes on 5.15.19. Positive reviews were filed by BBC.com’s Nicholas Barber, Screen Daily‘s Jonathan Romney, Variety‘s Guy Lodge, Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, THR‘s Jordan Mintzer, Cineuropa’s Fabien Lemercier, The Playlist‘s Caroline Tsai and Awards Watch correspondent Mina Takla.

HE review, “Push Comes to Shove“, filed on 5.15.19:

“The first truly exciting film of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival screened this afternoon — Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly knit Muslim community, it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

“Written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard, Les Miserables feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

“But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride.

“Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood.

“It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.

“Closing motto: ‘There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.’

Originally posted on 1.11.08: “Does anyone remember that scene in At Close Range when Sean Penn and his gang are getting ready to rob a truck, and Penn tells Crispin Glover to stand watch and tell them when he sees it coming down the road? Glover eventually spots it from afar, but he can’t just spit out the words “here it comes.” Because he’s “Crispin Glover”, he gets all spazzy and tongue-tied as he says in that nerdy voice with one of his hands patting the back of his head, “Uhhmm…haaaeeeyyy?…here comes the truck!”

Steve McQueen‘s Chicago-based Widows was a sophisticated, femme-slanted heist thriller that was just as focused on racism, local politics and neighborhood culture as it was on the mechanics of a climactic robbery. It had elements of feminist fantasy but conveyed a semi-trustable feeling of 21st Century realism. Plus it had excellent performances. Plus that McQueeny art-film panache. It had enough reality echoes to pass muster.

Set in the late ’70s, Andrea Berloff‘s Manhattan-based The Kitchen uses the same premise as Widows (i.e., wives becoming criminals after their husbands are either killed or sent up the river). But it’s far less finessed than the MxQueen film, and is heavily invested in a kind of feminist-woke fantasy plot in which the three heroines — Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elizabeth Moss — become better, tougher, more efficient criminals than their husbands while two of them become even more ruthless and brutal.

I didn’t believe a fucking word of it. A few scenes work (especially toward the end), but mostly it’s shallow, trite boilerplate stuff.

I didn’t hate The Kitchen. I actually liked Moss’s performance as a sadly abused, extra-angry wife whose ruthless side comes out when her brutish hubby is jailed, and I enjoyed Bill Canp‘s droll and avuncular Brooklyn mob boss. But I was shaking my head in disapproval less than five minutes in.

Almost every scene feels phony or hackneyed or second-tier in one way or another. There’s a Brooklyn hitman character named “Joe Goon”….c’mon! And there’s too much garbage on the streets. I know that Hell’s Kitchen (Manhattan’s West 40s) was a down-at-the-heels neighborhood in the ’70s, but almost every exterior scene looks like production assistants were told to throw garbage around for the sake of atmospheric realism. Too much, I tell you!

Moss’s Claire plus concerned mom Kathy (McCarthy) and their pal Ruby (Haddish) are the insufficiently respected wives of small-time thugs (Brian d’Arcy James, James Badge Dale, Jeremy Bobb) who get arrested and sentenced to three-year terms after holding up a liquor store.

The wives are told by the local Irish mob (aka the “Westies”) that they’ll be “taken care of” while their hubbies are in stir. Bullshit — the money they receive isn’t even enough to cover the rent. And so Kathy, Ruby and Claire start shaking down local merchants for protection money. Which in itself is obviously a hostile and oppressive thing to do, bui they do it with a smile and the ladelling of neighborly affection. The fuck?

Naturally the Westies aren’t happy that the wives are muscling in on the action, but guess what? The wives are tougher and more murderous than anyone expected. So fuck you, Mr. Irish mob boss — you’re not only a dead Mick but your head, legs and arms are being sawed off and your lungs are being removed in the bathroom before the whole package is dumped into the Hudson. Meanwhile the Italian Brooklyn bad guys (Camp, “Joe Goon” and the others) are anxious and wary but ready to talk turkey about slicing up the pie.

And yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda.

Yesterday Collider posted an interview with Guillermo del Toro in which he elaborated (somewhat) about his vision of Nightmare Alley, which might have starred Leonardo DiCaprio but will, in fact, star Bradley Cooper.

GDT: “The [William Lindsay Gresham] book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman, before I saw the Tyrone Power movie, and I loved the book. My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily…the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have…in my short films I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real underbelly of society type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”