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Last night I attended a screening of Benedict Andrews‘ Seberg (Amazon, 12.13), a bland and under-energized dramatization of the FBI’s persecution of actress Jean Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It struck me as the kind of thing that used to be called “an HBO movie” — decent enough but lacking exceptional elements.

The initial plan was for Kristen Stewart, who plays the titular tragic character, to stop by for a post-screening q & a, but she couldn’t attend for whatever reason. HE guess: Some kind of personal issue. Maybe her spirit wilted.

I know that despite a lot of pans for the film Stewart’s performance has been generally praised. I don’t know, man. While I worshipped her wonderfully skittish existential performance in Personal Shopper, she seemed to be more or less playing herself in Seberg. I know her manner and her behavioral tics like the back of my hand, and she seemed to be more or less defaulting to them. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it does put you in a kind of ho-hum place.

Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse‘s screenplay pays an awful lot of attention to the FBI guys who were assigned to shadow and harass Seberg (principally Jack O’Connell‘s Jack Solomon, a young straight-arrow with a certain compassion for Seberg, and secondarily Vince Vaughn and Colm Meaney as a couple of bureau dickheads).

The dependably charismatic Anthony Mackie plays Hakim Jamal, a real-life Black Panther bigwig whom Seberg had a brief affair with. Margaret Qualley and Zazie Beetz‘s performances as Solomon’s and Jamal’s wives, respectively, are negligible.

Here’s the thing: To go by any biographical summary or link file about this period in Seberg’s life, her worst emotional trauma was triggered by the FBI’s planting of a false rumor (via columnist Joyce Haber) that the father of her unborn daughter was Black Panther Raymond Hewitt, and not husband Romain Gary.

Seberg was so devastated by this phony allegation that she suffered a miscarriage. And yet neither Seberg nor Gary were faithful to each other during their eight-year marriage, and Seberg had always been quite the libertine, and was fairly open about it. So what’s the big deal if she’s pregnant by someone other than Gary? She was, after all.

As the movie notes, Seberg had a brief thing with Hakim Jamal but she also fell into a breathless on-set affair with Clint Eastwood during the making of Paint Your Wagon. (The movie totally ignores this.) While filming Macho Callahan in Mexico in 1969–70, Seberg became romantically involved with a student revolutionary named Carlos Ornelas Navarra. She gave birth to Navarra’s daughter, Nina Hart Gary, on 8.23.70.

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Name me one other hotshot critic-columnist in this country or even on this continent who’s paid $26 and change to re-experience a film that he knows is unexceptional and even mediocre in terms of story, dialogue and acting…name me one other person in my realm who’s shelled out to see a second-rate action film just to savor the 4K 60 fps HFR + 3D. I’ll bet money nobody else has done this. Because nobody does hardcore tech like Hollywood Elsewhere.

Gemini Man director Ang Lee to Indiewire: “They are trying to make digital look like film. It’s a different media with different perception, different requirements. Digital doesn’t want to be film, it wants to be something else. I think we need to get passed that and discover what it is.”

“There is no bad media — there are only bad artists.”

“Film got so good because for over a hundred years, genius after genius, craftsman after craftsman, years of audience feedback, it got really sophisticated,” said Lee. “I just believe there is a very different beauty, a dreamlike-ness in digital. I’m trying to find it.”

Seasoned critic friend: “I saw the 120 fps 3D Gemini Man, and like all 3D films I’ve ever seen when a face was in close-up everything behind it was blown out of focus. Then again it was not murky like other 3D films I’ve seen. And the action scenes were fun. But wearing those glasses sucks, especially over my glasses.

“Does Ang Lee have any idea how bad film projection is outside of New York and L.A.?”

What can you say about Brooke Nevils‘ accusation that Matt Lauer had (I can’t figure a way around using the following three words) nonconsensual anal intercourse with her five years ago in a Sochi hotel room…I can’t even finish this sentence, the images are so odious and icky.

What it all seems to boil down to is that (a) the months-long office affair between Lauer and Nevils was consensual except for this particular unwanted congress, which Nevils said she was “too drunk” to give consent to, and (b) Lauer almost certainly showed a lack of caring and sensitivity.

Basic etiquette: You don’t just plow ahead without a green light, for God’s sake. You don’t say to your sexual partner “have you ever had sex while watching Cockleshell Heroes with Trevor Howard?” If the woman or man says, “No, I’ve never done it while Cockleshell Heroes is on the flatscreen…let’s give that a whirl,” okay. But you ask gently, and if he or she is too drunk to offer an opinion about Trevor Howard one way or the other, the gentlemanly thing is to not stream the movie. Simple.

Yesterday three nice people (two guys and a gal) kicked the Bill-and-Monica saga around. I was one of the guys, but that’s as far as I’ll go with specifics. It started with a dispute about how much of a predator Bill Clinton might have been and how willing if not eager Ms. Lewinsky might have been.

Guy #1: Monica Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern and he was the President of the United States. “It’s honestly hard to think of a dynamic that is more clearly an egregious abuse of power,” wrote lawyer Lindsey Barrett on Twitter.

American columnist Kristen Powers tweeted, “This actually shouldn’t be so hard. Hillary isn’t responsible for what her husband did, but she should be able to recognize it as an abuse of power.”

Last March Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair that she considered the affair “a gross abuse of power”, adding “he was my boss…he was the most powerful man on the planet”.

HE: That aside, are you actually contending that Bill Clinton harassed and bullied Monica Lewinsky into having an affair against her will? Don’t various accounts argue with this notion quite strenuously?

Gal #1: “She might have been ample and Rubenesque but Monica was hot. Clinton didn’t pray on some poor ignored chubby girl. She flirted outrageously with him and he flirted back. He could not resist her because she was HIS type. Beanie Feldstein is not THAT type. This casting choice alone tells you this dramatization is going to be a one-sided story of a sexual predator, which is 100% wrong. She was in her early 20s and very, very willing.”

HE: We all understand the power dynamic, but how does that work in the theoretical case of the widowed Michael Douglas in The American President? No hitting on any White House staffer, regardless of age or position? Only lobbyists like Annette Bening’s Sydney? Who exactly is a U.S. President allowed to show interest in, given the huge imbalance of power and the likelihood of being attacked down the road by #MeToo?

Otherwise, bullshit. 22 year-olds are not babes in the woods or poor little lambs. My rule is that you’re on you’re own and expected to live and cope in the adult world when you hit 20 or your junior year in college. And certainly by age 21. (Any older guy who makes a play for a sophomore or freshman or any woman in her late teens is definitely crossing the line.) But it all changes at 20 or 21, and certainly by age 22, or a year past graduation.

Clinton is/was an opportunistic hound, but so was Benjamin (“the father of France”) Franklin. So was Warren G. Harding. So were FDR, JFK, Gary Hart. Not every powerful politician with a yen for the ladies is necessarily a criminal predator. Or were they all Harvey Weinstein in your eyes?

Men and women tend to use and exploit each other in the quiet corridors of power. Lewinsky knew what she was doing. She saw an opportunity, turned on the alpha, scored and then expected to be compensated with some kind of job advancement. Which is an occasional benefit from affairs of this sort. Pay for play has been a common dynamic in business & government cultures for quite a while now. She became irate and conflicted and given to Linda Tripp confessions when she wasn’t shown what she calculated was her due.

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Last night I watched Robert Clift and Hillary Demmon‘s Making Montgomery Clift (1091 Media, streaming on 10.15), which may be the most deep-down accurate and highly complex portrait of the closeted, achingly sensitive, Oscar-nominated actor (best known for From Here To Eternity, Red River, I Confess, Freud, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Misfits) ever presented on a screen. Seriously — it’s really something else.

I’ve read two Clift biographies (Robert LaGuardia‘s “Monty” and Patricia Bosworth‘s “Montgomery Clift: A Biography“), and I came away from this viewing what felt like a more intimate, finely textured understanding of who the poor guy really was.

The 88-minute film is basically an assemblage of home movies, tape recordings and talking heads mixed with first-hand narration by Robert Clift, the son of Clift’s older brother, William Brooks Clift (1919–1986) and journalist Eleanor Clift, with creative collaboration from Hillary Demmon.

I was afraid at first that the film might be some kind of family-approved gloss-over, but it’s not. It feels like an honest, upfront, no-bullshit assessment. Nobody’s afraid or reluctant to discuss anything.

It contends, for one thing, that while Clift was closeted he wasn’t conflicted or tortured over his sexuality.

It goes a little soft in talking frankly about the alcohol and drug addictions that ended Cliff’s life at age 46 (from a heart attack), but it insists that despite everyone having concluded that Clift spent the last ten years of his life slowly committing suicide, he loved living and wanted to keep going as best he could for as long as he could. The conversational tapes and movie footage reveal a relatively happy, spirited, engaged, curious, intellectually agile fellow for the most part.

It’s especially fascinating because Brooks Clift, dissatisfied with the LaGuardia biography and even the respected Bosworth chronicle, wanted to write his own biography of his younger brother, but never got it done. And so Robert, utilizing all kinds of movies and tapes that his father had kept, has kind of written it for him, in a way. He’s told the tale that his father would have.

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She cackled and fainted and the bumblefucks hated her guts, but Hillary Clinton was no dummy. She probably still isn’t.

I finally saw Ang Lee‘s Gemini Man last night, and wouldn’t you know I’d pick a screening that didn’t show the 4K high-frame-rate 3D version? I saw a plain old 2D at 24 fps version, but it looked fine. And I was never in any serious pain during the 117 minute running time.

Yes, Gemini Man has a lousy 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it to be an agreeable so-whatter. It diverts, it moves along, it’s not overly irksome. Especially during the first 25 to 35 minutes.

Will Smith does a reasonably good job of playing two versions of an ace professional assassin named Henry Brogan, or more specifically his own 50 year-old self along with a digitally composed 20something version (aka “Junior”). And I like the deft way that Lee cuts away from the grisly stuff from time to time.

I didn’t “turn” on Gemini Man, exactly, but it gradually let me down, and I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into my seat. It gradually hit me, in other words, that the story was kinda routine in a flat-footed way. There were basically too many cooks working on too many drafts for too many years, and so the script feels over-written, over-honed, over-edited, ground into mush. It feels like re-heated leftovers.

The credited writers are David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke but Andrew Niccol, David Benioff, Brian Helgeland, Jonathan Hensleigh, Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson also took whacks at it.

But the de-aging VFX are better than The Irishman‘s in one respect. In Martin Scorsese‘s world-class film the face and hair styles give to Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are definitely younger but the bodies are their own — older, chunkier, less than athletic. Will Smith’s “Junior”, on the other hand, is slim and lean and a physique of a workout Nazi.

That Greenpeace banner allegedly hanging outside Trump Tower in Las Vegas and lambasting Donald Trump for betraying the Kurds is presumedly a deepfake. Not to diminish the horror of the Syrian-Kurd-ISIS situation, but as long as we’re talking deepfakes I prefer the below variation.

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My heart goes out to DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze, who can’t even pay his heating bill. The world can be a cold (i.e., heartless) and brutal place, but the bell began tolling on physical media big-time six or seven years ago. I’m stunned that Studio Canal, Warner Archive, Network and Shout! Factory won’t even send Tooze review copies of their Blurays. DVD Beaver has been a necessary home-video pit stop for a long, long time. What kind of people are running these outfits?

Yes, Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz‘s The Peanut Butter Falcon, a Down Syndrome buddy dramedy, got rave notices when it opened a couple of months ago. And yes, it has the right kind of cast for an indie, Mud-like venture of this sort — Shia LaBeouf, Dakota Johnson, John Hawkes, Bruce Dern, Jon Bernthal, Thomas Haden Church. I plan to watch within two or three days, or certainly by the weekend. It begins streaming on 11.5. My bad, but I’ll soon make amends.

As I understand this latest development, Donald Trump and his attorneys have decided to stonewall any and all attempts from House Democrats to obtain pertinent testimony or documents in their ongoing impeachment inquiry. Basically a blanket “eff you” posture. This in itself would and should add another article of impeachment along with the “get the Bidens” Ukraine whistleblower thing.

The bottom line (and please inform if I’m missing something) is that Adam Schiff and other pro-impeachment House Democrats don’t have the power or the cojones to force Trump to do anything. They’ll strongly protest, of course, and will eventually vote for impeachment, but we all know the drill about the Republican-dominated Senate being all but certain to vote it down.

Excerpt: “Trump administration lawyers and aides have spent days puzzling over how to respond to the impeachment inquiry, and [now this] abrupt move suggests that the president’s team has calculated that he is better off risking the House’s ire — and even an impeachment article focused on the obstruction — than setting a precedent for cooperation with an investigation they have strenuously argued is illegitimate.

“The strategy, if it holds, carries substantial risk to the White House. Privately, some Republicans had urged the White House to allow witnesses…to appear, in order to deflate Democratic accusations of a cover-up and offer a public rationale for the president’s actions toward Ukraine. Now, some Republicans worry, Democrats have more fodder to argue publicly that Mr. Trump has something to hide.”