Scarlet Johansson doesn’t make perfect career decisions (who does?) and sometimes wavers a bit (like all of us), but for my money she has a pair of cast-iron cojones. Because she’s stood up to the wokester thugs by going her own way on Woody Allen and by recently repeating her view that political correctness can get (and in fact has gotten) in the way of creative freedom.

“I recognize that in reality, there is a widespread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to,” Johnasson said in a statement after her views were misrepresented, she claimed, in an interview with As If magazine.

In the As If piece, Johansson said that she continues “to support, and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included. [But] as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job. I feel like it’s a trend in my business and it needs to happen for various social reasons, yet there are times it does get uncomfortable when it affects the art because I feel art should be free of restrictions.”

In a 7.3 HE piece called “Ciswashing” I assessed the criticism that Johansson was getting at the time for wanting to play real-life trans massage parlor owner Dante “Tex” Gill in Rub & Tug, a crime drama that would have been directed by Ghost in the Shell helmer Rupert Sanders.

“The trans-twitter community apparently feels that only a real-deal trans actor should play Gill (who transitioned from being a woman to a man),” I wrote. “They presumably regard Johansson’s casting in the same light that Native Americans probably saw the casting of Henry Brandon as ‘Scar’, the Comanche villian in John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56).

“Let’s back up and consider how this could have been avoided. Actors in top-tier Hollywood films are typically cast by producers and directors with two goals in mind — (a) find the most gifted actor to play a given role for the benefit of the film, and (b) preferably an actor with name recognition among the hoi polloi, in order to help boost ticket sales. So in a perfect world Johansson would have declined and Sanders would’ve found a gifted trans actor instead…fine. But who would that be?

Posted last year by HE commenter “Adam”: “This is just the latest outrage from ScarJo. She played an alien in Under the Skin for crying out loud when every single person knows full well she’s from Earth. And then there was The Other Boleyn Girl nonsense in which we were expected to believe she was British royalty! I mean, you can’t make this stuff up! And don’t get me started on her Black Widow character…I’ve seen her try martial arts in real life and it’s all totally fake — she can’t fight for shit. So I’m glad someone finally called her out for the fraud she is.”

Here‘s what Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Peter Bart had to say about p.c. Stalinists a la Donald Sutherland in the final shot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Which Mike Pence realizes, of course. So he stands there with his arms crossed arms and that frosty look on his face…okay, I’ve seen enough, later. And without decent facilities those poor guys are filthy and sleeping on cement.

…when the power goes out. People reach out, everyone comes together. I’m not hearing about uncivil behavior but the opposite. Not much of a blackout because it’s still dusky outside. Okay, it’s getting darker now. 40 years to the day after the ’77 blackout. The outage of ’65 happened on 11.9.65.

I guess this is what they call a New York moment. After being trapped on the F for an hour because of the power outage I emerged to see dark restaurants & traffic lights, civilians directing traffic, & an evacuated Carnegie Hall concert happening in the street. #nyc #Blackout pic.twitter.com/3p9UWtRrel

— Briallen Hopper (@briallenhopper) July 14, 2019

No cops directing traffic at 66th Street and Broadway. Up to the #fruitstandguy to direct traffic because of the #blackout in nyc pic.twitter.com/jQpCC8TgMI

— wilkssc (@wilkssc) July 13, 2019

In a 7.12 opinion piece, USA Today contributor Chris Truax urges Democrats to be wary of choosing a candidate who primarily appeals to urban wokesters and focus instead on which candidate will seem like a decent alternative to voters in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden, he seems to be saying, and not Kamala Harris, whom he seems to feel might be too left for middle-aged Erie residents by virtue of being a POC from Oakland. Truax might even be saying that Elizabeth Warren is too left, although that notion seems silly. Warren is entirely sensible, practical, level-headed and no lefty loony. So is Harris, if you ask me, but I’m talking about shorthand perceptions.

Truax believes that Erie voters understand that Trump is bad news and are ready to cast their vote for a Democratic candidate who seems modest, well-mannered and reasonable. And yet he doesn’t address the fact that Biden is an Obama nostalgia candidate — a guy who’s much more about the mindset of the ’80s and ’90s than the 21st Century.

You know who really fits the “modest, well-mannered and reasonable” bill? Mayor Pete. Because he’s brilliant and Christian and relatively conservative within the liberal Democratic realm, and not necessarily beholden to the woke fruitcake cabal.

Truax: “The people you really have to motivate aren’t the Democratic base, they’re the people in the middle who have been unsettled by Trump’s presidency. They can see what Trump is and will happily vote for a reasonable alternative. But if Democrats offer what appears to them as a choice between death by hanging and death by firing squad, a lot of them will just give up and not vote at all.

“There are four states that matter in 2020: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. Win three out of four of those states and Trump is a one-term president. No matter how popular something might be with activists in Los Angeles or donors in Manhattan, it’s dead weight or worse if it isn’t a winner with Rotary Club members in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“Want to put Minnesota, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire in play? Easy. Just run on policies like eliminating private health insurance, reparations for slavery, legalizing drugs and decriminalizing prostitution.

…I don’t want to be right.

A friend insists that yesterday’s post about Little Women and other fall hotties (“Gerwig’s Little Women Avoiding Festival Circuit?”) is “hogwash.” If he’s referring to the Little Women part, he needs to complain to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn and Anne Thompson and not me.

“I know several titles locked for Telluride,” he says, “and I don’t think you mention any of them, not even the right Netflix one. Actually there may be two.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me that none of the hotties I listed are going to Telluride as far as you know?”

I don’t care what this guy is saying — at least two or three of the films I mentioned (Ed Norton‘s Motherless Brooklyn, Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced, Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat, Gavin O’Connor‘s Torrance, Roger Michell‘s Blackbird, Rupert Goold‘s Judy, Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts) have to be Telluride-bound…c’mon.

He also commented about Jeff Sneider‘s prediction tweet about Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim and Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Just Mercy being possible Best Picture favorites, along with my inference that admirers of these films will represent “an anti-Green Book, authentic-black-experience pushback vote.”

“The Academy is not looking to ‘make up’ for Green Book,” he says. “They strongly endorsed it and still do. Queen & Slim sounds interesting but it’s about a black couple (played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) killing a white policeman and going on the lam. Universal plans to [try to] cover that up largely by selling it as a love story.”

“Warner Bros. is considering Just Mercy for an awards run but it is aimed more directly at MLK weekend. WB has so many possibilities, most notably Joker, so we’ll see. Like Green Book it’s an inspiring true story.”

Just Mercy is a variation on Call Northside 777** — a “get a convict out of jail because he’s innocent” drama. The director is Destin Daniel Cretton; the costars are Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Eva Ansley.

** Yeah, I know — Call Northside 777 who? It’s a 1948 James Stewart docudrama, based on a true story about a Chicago reporter who got an innocent guy out of jail.

I’ve been hearing about Benh Zetlin‘s Wendy for quite a while now. I asked about the situation 16 months ago, and the general impression is that it was going through a difficult journey. I heard today that the Fox Searchlight release will be test-screening soon, and that it might (I say “might”) be ready for the fall festivals. It’s been eight and a half years since Zeitlin’s debut film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s hoping.

Apollo 11 is truly great within its own realm — an immersive, suspenseful, larger-than-life, clean-as-a-hound’s-tooth revisiting of a momentous moment in world history. It’s moving and majesterial and as tightly wound as a Swiss watch — i.e., all the boring parts of an eight-day voyage removed for viewing pleasure.

And Ryan Gosling should be advised that while Neil Armstrong was allegedly aloof and not the joshiest of fellows, he was not a chronic gloomhead — shot after shot in Miller’s doc shows him smiling, grinning and otherwise beaming like a prep schooler.

Apollo 11 gets you emotionally in at least a couple of ways. In hindsight it’s almost sad to watch when you consider how good and unified everyone in the U.S. felt when the Eagle landed on the moon on 7.20.69 vs. how tens of millions of center-left types are currently depressed, despairing and mortified over the degradation of American values and standards by the ongoing Trump clown show.

True, things were anything but peaceful in the summer of ’69 — the Vietnam War raging, the “silent majority” discomforted by anti-war demonstrations and a general loathing of President Richard Nixon plus counter-culture upheavals (pot, LSD, hippies, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, “whitey on the moon”, Woodstock, breakup of the Beatles). So life is never peaceful and strife and discomfort are often the orders of the day.

But the sick-brain world of Trump, his Fox enablers and the meatball redhats is a realm beyond. Trump is a beast, a liar, a con man destroyer, a short-fused fool. For all his dark currents and venal determinations Nixon at least understood and respected the system of checks and balances for the most part and, apart from “the plumbers”, generally operated within constitutional restraints. And he did push for environmental laws, a national health care system and the raising of labor wages. Five years ago Noam Chomsky opined that Nixon was “the last liberal president.”

As disturbing and discordant as 1969 was, it was a comparative garden of eden compared to what’s happening now. Richard M. wasn’t anywhere near as appalling as Donald J.

Side observation: Watching all those dozens upon dozens of NASA guys with their identical short-sleeved white dress shirts and ties and almost every of them wearing white-walled crew cuts (a few wore their hair with a bit of length and a part) is to observe a species that truly no longer exists. Not one of these NASA drones wore even a hint of longish sideburns…not one! And sideburns were all over the place in 1969.

And to go by Apollo 11 not one of them was even a little bit overweight, much less fat and forget obese. Because the American diet was different 50 years ago and middle-aged people were generally in better shape.

Late yesterday afternoon Kanye West and some pallies showed up at IMAX headquarters to watch what may have been a “James Turrell Sunday service concert experience” doc inside the largest screening room. (IMAX also has a second smaller screening room for overflows.) Did anyone know that Kanye has produced a Turrell IMAX doc? News to me but this is what a Kanye website guy has tweeted. There are plans, he says, to “premiere it across the country”.

In any event the screening schedules of Kanye and a bunch of film journalists and industry savants collided yesterday at said headquarters in Playa Vista.

Who knows what time Kanye’s screening was booked for, but when I arrived at the IMAX facility for a 7pm screening of Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11, I was directed to an outdoor patio where 70 or 80 tastemakers were gathered. The Apollo 11 showing was being delayed, I was told, because the Kanye crowd was still watching what I later inferred was the Turrell doc, and who knew when it would end?

Kanye West, artist James Turrell.

No worries as the patio vibe was cool and convivial and the libations were free. We finally wound up going inside around 7:30 pm (I saw Kanye and pallies exiting as we went in), and after a brief introduction by Miller Apollo 11 started around 7:45 pm. The screening ended at 9:18 pm. An after-party with drinks and hors d’oeuvres followed.

The likeliest reason for the delay was that Kanye, known for his occasionally flaky and eccentric behavior, was late to his Turrell doc screening. (What are the odds of the screening being delayed if a friend of Kanye’s had been late?) Many top-tier celebrities, even those not known for their flaky and eccentric behavior, are often late for this or that appointment. They gradually learn that they don’t have to live by a strict clock and others will always adapt to their whims. (In the late ’90s Robert Redford chaired a small Sundance Film Festival press conference at his Sundance resort, and year after year he was always 15 minutes late.)

If I was the person who agreed to rent the main IMAX theatre to Kanye prior to a major industry screening, I would have factored this shit in. If the Turrell IMAX doc had a running time of, say, 90 minutes, I would have told Kanye that the screening would have to begin at 4 pm, knowing that the screening would most likely begin closer to 4:30 pm or perhaps even a bit later. Even if it started 45 minutes late, it would still be over at 6:15 pm with plenty of time for the Kanye crowd to evacuate before the Apollo 11 crowd arrived.

If I was the IMAX rep in charge of greeting the Kanye crowd and seeing to their comfort yesterday afternoon, I would have told them when they arrived 30 or 45 minutes late that their screening would have to happen in the smaller IMAX theatre because the larger screening room had to be free at 6:30 pm to accomodate an industry crowd that would be arriving around then.

The copy for Eric Kohn and Anne Thompson’s latest “Screen Talk” podcast (#250) states that Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women (Columbia, 12.25) “seems to be avoiding the festival circuit altogether.” Really? I hadn’t heard that. Word around the campfire is that the second half of Gerwig’s film delivers the goods, and that acting-wise Saoirse Ronan is “great as ever” and “a “lock” for a Best Actress nomination, and that Florence Pugh has “an earth-shattering monologue”.

Jeff Sneider tweet: “After surveying the awards landscape, chatting with sources & listening to the infamous InSneider gut, I’m prepared to go way out on a limb and tell you in July that one year after the Green Book win, the Oscar will go to one of these two movies — Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim and Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Just Mercy.” What Sneider means, I gather, is that an anti-Green Book, authentic-black-experience pushback vote will constitute a good part of the support for these two.

The fall hotties are still Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Marielle Heller‘s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Ed Norton‘s Motherless Brooklyn**, Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced, Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat, Gavin O’Connor‘s Torrance, Roger Michell‘s Blackbird, Rupert Goold‘s Judy, Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts. Which others?

I saw Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 last February at a press screening inside the AMC Century City IMAX theatre, and it was flat-out wonderful. I was knocked flat by the sheer textural dazzle of the 70mm large format images. The 93-minute doc takes you back 50 years and into the launch of Apollo 11 and of course the moon landing that happened on 7.20.69.

A significant portion of this stunning immersion — narration-free and sans talking heads — is composed of unreleased 70mm footage from the launch (look, it’s Johnny Carson!) and the ocean recovery of Apollo 11. This is blended with uprezzed 35 and 16 mm film, still photography and closed-circuit television footage, all of which was digitally scanned at Final Frame, a post-production firm in New York City.

The sum effect is one of a wowser, you-are-there voyage into the past. Except it feels like the present during those 93. It delivers an unmistakable spiritual current.

This evening I’ll be attending a special Apollo 11 screening inside the huge IMAX Corporation theatre in Playa Vista, to be followed by a chit-chat mixer with Miller. The idea, of course, is to commemorate the half-century anniversary, which is only 8 days from now. And, of course, to remind press people that this Neon release needs to be seen on a big, big screen. And that it needs to be nominated for the Best Feature Doc Oscar.

Universal release Apollo 11 on DVD, Bluray and digital streaming on 5.14.19.

The 50th anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick tragedy will happen six days hence, on 7.18.19.

An exciting 60-second drug-smuggling video was released yesterday by the U.S. Coast Guard. Recorded somewhere in the eastern Pacific on 6.18.19, it shows Coast Guard commandos chasing a semi-submersible drug smuggling vessel (SPSS) carrying “more than 17,000 pounds of cocaine, valued at about $232 million,” according to The Washington Post.

“Alto tu bote! Alto tu bote!” the Coast Guard guy yells. The approximate English translation is “stop your motherfucking boat, assholes! You’re fucking busted!”

All hail the can-do, take-charge, super-macho attitude of the Coast Guard, but Hollywood Elsewhere has a question for the drug dealers. You guys allegedly have lots of dough so why are you trying to smuggle cocaine inside a semi-submersible, or a small Nautilus-like, Captain Nemo-styled craft that’s visible to patrol boats? Why don’t you use fully submersible subs, or the kind that Coast Guard guys can’t see because, you know, they’re underwater and therefore visually undetectable?

I know that the HE commentariat disapproves of my watching HBO all the time, but I’ve forgotten if they approve or disapprove of Big Little Lies. I’ve been watching season #2 all along, mostly because of Meryl Streep. I wasn’t all that big on season #1, which was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee; season #2 has been directed by Andrea Arnold, but not in a style that anyone would call Arnold-esque (hand-heldy, here and there, natural light). It just feels smooth and steady for the most part.

Today an Indiewire piece by Chris O’Falt (“Big Little Lies’ Season 2 Turmoil: Inside Andrea Arnold’s Loss of Creative Control“) reports that after Arnold finished shooting season #2 last year, Vallee and Big Little Lies producer David E. Kelley stepped in and ordered extra shooting, and then cut Arnold’s creative balls off during editing.

O’Falt: “According to a number of sources close to the production, there was a dramatic shift in late 2018 as the show was yanked away from Arnold, and creative control was handed over to executive producer and Season 1 director Jean-Marc Vallee. The goal was to unify the visual style of Season 1 and 2. In other words, after all the episodes had been shot, take Arnold’s work and make it look and feel like the familiar style Vallée brought to the hit first season.”

“It was [just] as Arnold started to assemble scenes that Kelley and HBO started to see there was a problem,” O’Falt continues. “Before Arnold and her London editing team were able to even complete an official cut of an episode, Vallée started to take over. Post-production shifted from London to Vallée’s home city of Montreal, where his own editorial team started cutting what is now airing on HBO. Soon after, 17 days of additional photography were scheduled.”

So why did Kelley and his HBO bosses agree to hire a headstrong director with a distinctive dart-and-shoot style if what they really they wanted was someone who would more or less ape Vallee’s approach?

The apparent answer is that Kelley and HBO execs weren’t all that familiar with Arnold’s previous films (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) and were therefore taken aback when they saw her season #2 footage. O’Falt reports that Arnold was more or less hired because of Vallee’s recommendation.

O’Falt: “The optics were not lost on many associated with Big Little Lies: A show dominated by some of the most powerful actresses in Hollywood hired a fiercely independent woman director…who was now being forced to watch from the director’s chair as scenes were shot in the style of her male predecessor.”