In the wake of the Kavanaugh tragedy, a “don’t fuck with me” Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) toplining the sixth and presumably final season of House of Cards is perfect. You could almost call it brilliant. It certainly feels uncanny. The producers obviously couldn’t have anticipated the Kavanaugh confirmation or the tears of rage that followed, but here we are. All eight episodes will begin streaming on 11.2.18. I don’t care what else is happening — I’m staying indoors that day for the whole ride.

“A Star Is Born’s hoary tale of a showbiz veteran (Bradley Cooper) being eclipsed by the ingenue (Lady Gaga) he mentors and falls in love with is now whorier than ever. It can challenge the 1932, 1937, 1954, and 1976 editions only by relying on audience ignorance of those versions and worshiping contemporary showbiz shallowness.

“Lachrymose at its base, this version is just unabashed Hollywood merchandising. It sells a bald-faced PC checklist: white-male weakness, feminist bravado, servile and obsequious blacks, Latins and queers — none of this particularly enlivened by Cooper and Gaga’s competing narcissism.

“This is A Star Is Born for the American Idol generation, a movie so out of touch with the artistic expression of universal feelings (what was formerly the pride of entertainment adepts) that it winds up simply promoting the present-day system of showbiz crudeness.” — from Armond White’s 10.5 essay, “A Star Is Born Is Remade The Wrong Way.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t a pair of authoritarian leaders — European, fascistically-inclined — say roughly the same thing about Jews and Communists? Between 80 and 85 years ago, as I recall.

In his review of a new German Bluray of Henry King’s The Bravados, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze (a) notes the presence of “darker visuals” than those on the 2005 DVD, and (b) allows that the Bluray may have “even more CinemaScope mumps” than the previous disc.

Why the hell would any Bluray distributor issue a film with a bad case of the mumps? Particularly after the de-mumpifying (or de-mumpification) of The Innocents, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and The Big Country. I realize there are probably fewer than 100 people on the planet right now who care about the persistence of the CinemaScope mumps, but I’m one of them, dammit.

For the last 21 months I’ve been telling myself that as grotesque and fiendishly destructive as Donald Trump‘s administration has been, it’s still a passing hurricane — a political climate system that will eventually blow away or at least dissipate, perhaps (many of us hope) as soon as 2021. But with yesterday’s swearing in Brett Kavanaugh is a toxic stain that will never wash out. Not until he dies or is removed from the bench through impeachment, but what are the odds of that happening? The nation is bent and diminished this morning. It’s been a terrible weekend.

Tatyana caught Bohemian Rhapsody last night at the Fox lot screening. I won’t see it until next Thursday (10.11). “You should prepare yourself for possibly not liking Bohemian Rhapsody as much as I did,” she wrote last night. She didn’t elaborate but emphasized that for her “it’s a very strong film…if you really love Queen, you will love it. I’m a huge Queen fan, so I was in heaven whenever the music played. I didn’t feel the time element at all. Nice humor, nice cats, many terrific episodes.” One caveat: “Freddie Mercury was tall with a beautiful body. Rami Malek is short and no match for Freddie in that regard.”

Condolences to family, fans, friends and colleagues of Scott Wilson, who passed Saturday (10.6) at age 76. As far as I know Wilson was admired as a good fellow and a dependable second-tier thesp over the last five decades, but it was during a special three-year period (’67 to ’69) that he became an extra-hot actor who seemed to be channeling something above and beyond.

During this charmed period Wilson costarred in three nervy films — Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (in which Wilson played Clutter family killer Dick Hickock), Sydney Pollack‘s Castle Keep (a surreal WWII movie in which Wilson was “Corporal Clearboy”, one of many characters who seemed to be tripping on mescaline) and John Frankenheimer‘s The Gypsy Moths (in which Wilson played skydiver Malcolm Webson).

And that was it — Wilson’s hot streak ended and he became a more-or-less steadily employed character actor for the next half-century, give or take. And good for him.

Posted on 12.22.11: In the summer of ’81 I had a special Scott Wilson moment. It happened (or more precisely didn’t happen) in a hip West Hollywood bar (an actor’s hangout joint near Sweetzer) on Santa Monica Blvd. I was with a lady, and the first thing I noticed after entering the main room and ordering a drink was Wilson sitting at a table with a friend.

Wilson had played murderer Dick Hickock in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, and this was foremost on my mind. After mulling it over I told my girlfriend that I wanted to go over and get Wilson’s autograph and (this was crucial) ask him to write “hair on the walls” below his name.

The phrase came from Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel and the film version of same. Prior to their late-night visit to the home of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, Hickock promised his psychopathic accomplice Perry Smith (Robert Blake) that no matter what happens “we’re gonna blast hair all over them walls.” I thought it might be ironically cool to persuade Wilson to offer a little riff on that.

I wrote in the morning, caught a 1:30 pm screening of The Hate U Give, and then decided to write a bit more instead of seeing a 4:30 pm screening of Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, which I’ve seen twice now. Then it was over to the sprawling estate of Silvercup Studios honcho Stuart Suna. Ran into Rory Kennedy (Last Days in Vietnam) and First Man screenwriter Josh Singer, among others. Nobody wanted to talk about Brett Kavanaugh…too dispiriting.

Tomorrow morning I’ll drop by Bill McCuddy‘s East Hampton home for coffee and maybe a podcast chat, and then possibly catch a 2 pm Shoplifters screening. The Port Jefferson-to-Bridgeport ferry leaves around 6:15 pm.

Red-carpet tent at Stuart Suna’s East Hampton home.

I know going in that any film based on a YA novel is going to try my patience and generally give me a hard time. It’s not for nothing that I really hate those YA initials and every story-telling scheme and strategy they seem to stand for,

Sure enough, George Tillman, Jr.’s The Hate U Give (20th Century Fox, 10.5), based upon Angie Thomas‘s same-titled YA novel, put me through a kind of slow-drip hell. I watched, I waited, I approved of the sentiments, I grew sullen, I looked at my watch, I exhaled, I shifted in my seat, I checked my watch again, etc.

A Black Lives Matter saga about a high-school-age girl (Amandla Sternberg) enduring grief, trauma and social pressure after she witnesses a male childhood friend being shot to death by a patrolman after a routine pull-over, The Hate U Give says and feels and insists upon all the right things in the deeply unfortunate realm of hair-trigger cop brutality and racial pigeonholing.

It says, in short, what any semi-compassionate, half-aware 21st Century resident would agree with and hope for, and yet Tillman’s film is nonetheless mediocre (as almost all YA adaptations are) — plotted and cross-plotted and about as one-note as a drama like this can be, at least by my standards. And aimed at those who prefer their social-issue dramas neatly ordered and spoon-fed.

I’m talking about on-the-nose dialogue, “good” but overly telegraphed (and often way too emphatic) performances, too schematic, trite plotting, characterizations that feel too pat and tidy. A line or a scene connect every so often, but not enough to turn the tide.

Legendary screenwriter Robert Towne once said that people almost always avoid saying what they’re really thinking. They’ll look away or sidestep or talk around the elephant in the room. The finest dialogue is therefore often about the undercurrent — the things that are there and churning within but not directly mentioned or in some cases even referenced.

Everything in The Hate U Give is directly addressed. It has almost no undercurrent because everything is on the kitchen table, and that’s the basic problem.

Not for me…sorry. I didn’t hate it but I wanted to be somewhere else.

“It’s worth mentioning now and forever that the Oscar race has little to do with the reality of great movies. Well, sometimes the two realities converge but the Oscar race is mostly about a race to the middle. You’re looking for something that thousands of people can agree upon is great. We know this can’t possibly be true as Zero Dark Thirty and The Limey and Vertigo and Citizen Kane were ignored or under-valued by this consensus. As was Psycho and Jaws and most of the films I consider great. The Oscar race is what it is, but in too many instances it’s the last thing you want to rely upon for any kind of true measure of a film’s worth over the long haul. Fuck these people.” — sent by a journalist friend when I shared a disparaging view of a presumed Best Picture contender, written by a producer pal.