There are no upcoming June releases of any apparent consequence so I may as well post HE’s Best of 2019 at Half-Time roster. A grand total of 23 films, and I don’t care if they’re docs or features, streaming or theatrical…none of those distinctions matter any more. I’m once again profusely apologizing for not having seen Christian Petzold‘s Transit but I’ll be correcting this oversight very soon.

How many of the 23 are really, really good? The first 20 with the exception of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which I feel is mostly a flavorful in-and-outer that pays off only at the very end. So basically 19 out of 23 are the cat’s meow. Seriously.

Jordan Ruimy‘s list: Luce, Dogman (HE: not so much), Dragged Across Concrete, Ayka (what?), The Art of Self-Defense, David Crosby: Remember My Name, Gloria Bell, Midnight Family, Cold Case Hammerskjold (excellent!), American Dharma, The Farewell (didn’t see it), Avengers: Endgame, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Portrait of A Lady on Fire.

I asked a young Manhattan-based friend for his 2019 faves, and he had the nerve to send a list that included David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake…c’mon! I hate it when films that certain people have found “interesting” or “offbeat intriguing” are listed as among the year’s best. No way in hell is Harmony Korine‘s The Beach Bum (55% on Rotten Tomatoes) one of the year’s finest; ditto the Dardennes brothers’ Young Ahmed…please.

1. Kent Jones‘ Diane / “All Hail Diane — 2019’s Best Film So Far“, filed on 3.27.19.

2. Craig Zahler‘s Dragged Across Concrete / “All Hail Dragged Across Concrete,” filed on 3.21.19.

3. FX’s Fosse/Verdon / “Fosse/Verdon — Theatrical, Exquisite, Pizazzy, Deep Blue,” filed on 4.25.19.

4. A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name / “Crosby Doc Hurts Real Good,” filed on 1.27.19.

5. Russo Brothers‘ Avengers: Endgame / “Okay With Nominating Endgame For Best Picture Oscar,” filed on 5.4.19.

6. Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse / “This Way Lies Madness,” filed on 5.19.19.

7. Diao Yinan‘s The Wild Goose Lake / “Goose-d by Diao Yinan Levitation,” filed on 5.18.19.

8. Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story / “Rolling Along With Scorsese/Dylan” filed on 6.10.19.

9. Julis Onah‘s Luce / “Luce: Assumptions, Triggers, Blind Spots“, filed on 1.29.19.

10. J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier / “Five Sons of Fred C. Dobbs,” filed on 3.6.19.

11. Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood / “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood Is…‘, filed on 5.21.19.

12. Olivia Wilde‘s Booksmart / “This Time SXSW Hype Was Genuine“, filed on 4.25.19.

13. Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire / “By my sights as close to perfect as a gently erotic, deeply passionate period drama could be,” excepted from “Midnight Panini,” filed on 5.21.19.

14. Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland / “After Tomorrow, Jackson’s Name Will Be Mud“, filed on 3.2.19.

15. Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird / “Basically A Black Moneyball About Basketball,” filed on 1.27.19.

16. Sydney Pollack and Alan Elliott‘s Amazing Grace / “Finally Saw Amazing Grace,” filed on 12.14.18.

17. Todd Douglas Miller‘s Apollo 11 / Just because I forgot to review this Neon/CNN Films doc doesn’t mean it doesn’t deliver a profound IMAX charge. I loved that it offers no narration or talking heads.

18. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre‘s The Mustang.

19. Mads Brugger‘s Cold Case Hammarskjöld / “Riveting, Occasionally Oddball Cold Case”, posted on 1.29.19.

20. Sebastien Lelio‘s Gloria Bell / “Moore May Snag Best Actress Nom for Gloria Bell,” filed on 9.13.18.

21. Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra‘s Birds of Passage / “Spreading Native Scourge,” filed on 11.26.18.

22. Kirill Serebrennikov‘s Leto / “When Russian Rock Was Born,” filed on 5.10.18.

23. Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini / “The Night Pasolini Died,” filed on 4.13.19.

From Boston Herald‘s Jim Verniere: Arctic, Gloria Bell, Diane, Dogman, The Fall of the American Empire, Booksmart, Greta, Halston, Aquarela, Hail Satan.

In my 20s I worked as a tree surgeon. Shitty money but at least I was in great shape. I did it all — shaping, pruning, tree removal (or “takedowns”), cabling, spraying. As a former professional I laughed out loud at the idiots in these videos. I always removed trees in a careful, methodical fashion. I would always climb to the top of a tree, tie in with my rope, saddle, spikes and chain, and then take the leaders and branches off one at a time, until the tree became a telephone pole. And then I’d start chainsawing chunks of it, one by one from the top and slowly working my way down.

If there was the slightest chance of any falling pieces hitting a shed or a swimming pool or (God forbid) the main residence, I would tie a rope to the piece I was about to cut and loop the rope over a nearby leader and have the ground crew slowly lower it down. And when it came time to drop the “telephone pole”, we would always make sure it would fall upon a bouncy bed of cut branches. There would always be a rope tied to the top with a couple of guys maintaining tension, and then I would carefully cut a pie slice at the base of the tree. The tree would always land exactly where I planned.

The guys in these videos (i.e., no women) are morons.

I’ve never owned a pair of white bucks, but I can feel myself warming to the possibility. I generally steer clear of preppy apparel, but I’ve got this idea that wearing these things (remember when people used to call high-style shoes “kicks”?) will make me feel good about life — that I’ll feel like some kind of special-aroma Great Gatsby guy if I wear them to screenings and restaurants and…whatever, to the West Hollywood Pavillions.

I can imagine wearing a pair as I stroll into a nice open-air rooftop bar (the Waldorf Astoria, say) while listening to Eric Clapton‘s “Anyone For Tennis” on my Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones.

I can foresee two problems. One, being snickered at or, you know, people calling me a clueless poseur. Two, the Robert Redford-as-Jay Gatsby thing only lasts for the first week or two, for once they get scuffed and beaten up the special aura evaporates.

I was looking online this morning and none of the white bucks I liked (like the ones for sale at the Brooks Brothers site) were in my size — i.e., 13. In the guy realm 13 isn’t all that unusual, but shoe sellers treat you like a carnival freak if your size is larger than 12. Plus a sales rep told me this morning that white bucks are regarded as seasonal accessories (in Southern California?), but summer is just beginning and they’re already running out. All right, forget it…a bad idea from the start.

Earlier today Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin and Matt Donnelly posted a story about Amazon’s release strategy for Scott Z. Burns‘ The Report, a fact-based whistleblower drama that I saw five months ago at Sundance.

Set in the late aughts, it’s about real-life Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) investigating, authoring and releasing a massive report on CIA torture, and in so doing exposing Bush-Cheney flim-flammery about the waging of the Iraq War.

The Variety story was fine except for the headline, which described The Report as an “awards hopeful“. That, trust me, is not in the cards. Burns film is plodding, sanctimonious and a chore to sit through — precisely the kind of self-righteous, moral-breast-beating drama that I can’t stand.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro posted the same story with a headline that said The Report would be getting an “Awards Season Release.” That, at least, was technically accurate as The Report‘s 9.27 theatrical release date falls within award season. The film’s streaming release will launch two weeks later (i.e., 10.11).

Industry pally: Why are you not writing at length about this Sienna Miller performance?

HE: Because I haven’t seen it. It played at the ’17 Venice Film Festival and the Oldenburg International Film Festival a year later, and that was it. Even if I had seen it, the #MeToo brigade would have me killed or at least shunned if I were to so much as mention a film by Jim Toback.

Industry pally: I’m sure you can find a link. As for this Crucible-like atmosphere of which you speak, it’s news to me! 🙂

HE: Are you kidding? It’s the French “terror” out there.

Industry pally: My sense of humor is sometimes a touch too dry.

The daily toxins finally became too much, and so Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving the White House at the end of the month. Strange as this may sound, she’s probably looking a great future.

All employers look for smarts, discipline, dependability and good political skills. And loyalty, of course. They don’t want someone with an independent mind or who marches to his/her own drum — they want a Good German who will do or say whatever the employer wants. By this standard old “Smokey Eye”, who’s been dutifully lying and obfuscating for Donald Trump since July 2017, should be able to find a flush new gig in the conservative community.

Some believe that every time you lie you inject a tiny amount of poison into your system, and that it stays there until you admit to it. And that you add to the general communal illness in the bargain. Think of the hundreds of blatant falsehoods that have come out of SHS over the last 23 months, and yet she’s apparently in good health. The applicable phrase is “when good things happen to bad people.”

Peter Wehner: “[This is] a window into the inverted moral world of Donald Trump. What he was arguing is ‘what helps me is, by definition, right, and what hurts my opponent should be done, and what hurts me is, by definition, wrong.’ That is the ethical construct that he operates upon. It’s a kind of moral narcissism. When you get a person with that kind of distorted moral world with the tremendous power of the Presidency, it does great damage to the country. This guy is a daily battering ram against norms, against ethics and integrity.”

This Once Upon A Time in Hollywood poster lays it right on the line. It says to potential viewers “we’re not a film — we’re a swaggering, half-smirking, eye-winking, cock-of-the-walk movie. We’re not a Michael Mann or a David Fincher film. It’s too bad all the drive-ins are closed because we’d be gangbusters on one of those big fucking outdoor screens, all dirty and half-ripped. We’re not L’Eclisse or Who’ll Stop The Rain, and we sure as shit aren’t Charlie Says. We’re into late ’60s atmosphere and Brad Pitt as Mr. Zen Cool, especially when he takes his Hawaiian shirt off. We’re not The Nice Guys but maybe a little bit like Paul Bogart‘s Marlowe…know that one? 1969? James Garner as Phillip Marlowe? That’s partly where we’re coming from. You all know the Quentin attitude movie-lore thing, and you’ve seen his last five or six films…we’re not selling anything tricky or complex or heavily shaded here. You just need to buy a ticket, grab an extra-buttered large popcorn and a large Diet Coke and settle back.”

Over the last three or four decades I’ve seen dozens of features and docs about rock bands, and not one of them has conveyed how difficult it is to make rock music sound really good. Good enough, I mean, to build a name for your band and maybe attract a modest following, or stir some level of interest on the part of competing labels. Let alone good enough to become serious rock stars.

Any bunch of musicians can get together and bang out a few chords and sing songs that sound reasonably decent. It’s easy as shit to become a garage band or even one good enough to make people get up and dance at a bar. But it’s difficult as hell to sound really tight and true.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

I haven’t seen Jake Scott‘s American Woman (Roadside/Vertical, 6.14), a hardscrabble child-rearing drama starring Sienna Miller. But I know that an erroneous impression about the film is conveyed in a 5.12 Miller interview by Indiewire‘s Kate Erbland.

The headline reads “Sienna Miller Explains Why She Finally Tackled a Lead Role After Acting For 20 Years.” The article begins by describing American Woman as “a smart and progressive film rooted in the female experience…more than that, it stars Miller as the eponymous American woman, marking the first lead role for the actress in a 20-year career.”

In the third paragraph Erbland quotes Miller as follows: “I’ve never carried a film…to be in every scene was really daunting and really challenging, without having a bigger male costar to hide behind and blame things on or being a vehicle for someone else’s film.”

In fact Miller carried a film 13 years ago when she played Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl (’07), which I found sad, striking, richly atmospheric and pretty much the cat’s meow all around.

You could argue that Factory Girl is a two-character drama with Guy Pearce costarring as Andy Warhol, but my recollection is that Miller’s Sedgwick was much more substantial. Factory Girl was her story, her arc — Sedgwick was the one who experienced all the hurt.

I was seriously taken with Miller’s acting, and in fact interviewed her one January afternoon at the Chateau Marmont, focusing on what I regarded as a breakthrough performance. Miller was only 25 at the time.

Here’s an HE piece (posted on 6.19.07) about the three versions of the film, and about the final version being released on DVD.

Excerpt: “The saga of George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl will be reshuffled once again with a third version set for release on July 17th. The cliche would be to call the film’s arduous shape-shifting ‘a long strange trip’ but it really has been that.” The film had basically been through the Harvey Weinstein meat-grinder process.

“I was lucky enough to see the first version — ’60s Andy Warhol-ish, instinctual, somewhat raw and downtownish — last summer, and I raved about it soon after, and particularly about Sienna Miller‘s tragically fluttery performance as Sedgwick.”

You can stream an HD version of Factory Girl on Amazon.

Here’s one of the shots I took of Miller when we did our January 07 interview at the Chateau Marmont:

Filed on 1.28.19: Like Scott Burns‘ The Report, Gavin Hood‘s Official Secrets (IFC Films, 8.23) is a fact-based whistleblower drama about exposing shifty, lying behavior on the part of the Bush-Cheney administration in the selling and prosecution of the Iraq War.

The Report is about Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) investigating, authoring and releasing a massive report on CIA torture; Official Secrets is about real-life translator and British intelligence employee Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) revealing a U.S. plan to bug United Nations “swing”countries in order to pressure them into voting in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which of course was founded upon a fiction that Saddam Hussein‘s Iraqi government was in possession of WMDs and represented a terrorist threat.

The difference is that while The Report is plodding, sanctimonious and a chore to sit through, Official Secrets is an ace-level piece about pressure, courage and hard political elbows — a grade-A, non-manipulative procedural that tells Gun’s story in brisk, straightforward fashion, and which recalls the efficient, brass-tack narratives of All The President’s Men or Michael Clayton.

Official Secrets is exactly the sort of fact-based government & politics drama that I adore, just as The Report is precisely the kind of self-righteous, moral-breast-beating drama that I can’t stand.

The performances by Knightley, Matt Smith (as Observer reporter Martin Bright), Matthew Goode (as journalist Peter Beaumont), Rhys Ifans as Ed Vulliamy, Adam Bakri as Yasar Gun, and
Ralph Fiennes as British attorney Ben Emmerson are excellent fits — as good as any fan of this kind of thing could possibly hope for.

Hood’s Eye in the Sky was one of the finest and most gripping films of 2015, and here he is again with another winner. Hats off to a good guy.

Michael Musto is reporting that the relentless Sylvia Miles — flamboyant New York personality and club-crawler first, spunky pitbull actress second — has passed at age 94. Condolences to friends, family, fans & all surviving 20th Century Manhattan vampires.

Acting-wise Miles peaked a half-century ago when she won a Best Supporting Actress nomination for playing “Cass” in John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy (’69); she was nominated for the same trophy six years later for a performance in Farewell, My Lovely (’75). Post-Cowboy the Miles performance that seemed to register the strongest was “Sally Todd,” a kind of Norma Desmond-like figure, in Paul Morrissey‘s Heat (’72). Joe Dallessandro played “Joe”, the studly William Holden-ish hustler in a speedo.

She also played “Doris the realtor” twice for Oliver Stone, initially in Wall Street (’87) and then Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (’10).

Miles was a permanent Manhattan nightlife fixture from the mid ’60s until…what, the early aughts? For decades she hobknobbed and kibbitzed with every New Yorker who mattered (and a lot who didn’t). In her ’70s and ’80s heyday the legend was that Miles and Andy Warhol “would attend the opening of an envelope.” I ran into her two or three times in the late ’70s and ’80s, and what of it? She never paused, never stopped.