Every now and then I’ll walk out of a bad film. Not out of boredom as much as an “irresistable impulse,” which is a rationale that Michigan attorney James Stewart used for Ben Gazzara murdering a guy in Anatomy of a Murder. Every time I do this I get ripped to shreds by “how dare you?” types. It’s very comforting to occasionally read there are fellow Gazzara types out there.

From “Beto and Ted — Who’s Ahead?,” a 9.21 Gail Collins column about the Texas Senatorial race between 46-year-old Democrat Beto O’Rourke and 47-year-old Republican Ted Cruz:

“Whatever else you feel, you’d have to admit this race has been darned interesting. Beside the normal fights over guns and health care and immigration, at one point the Cruz campaign called O’Rourke a ‘Triple Meat Whataburger liberal who is out of touch with Texas values.’ The state is still not entirely clear on what that means. Whataburger is a popular fast-food chain, and it seemed a lot like announcing your opponent was a left-wing Big Mac.

“O’Rourke responded by eating a Whataburger and then skateboarding around the restaurant parking lot. We definitely need more of this kind of cheery diversion in politics. People are already talking about a presidential run if he wins. Actually, Beto is so hot that people are speculating about a presidential run if he loses.”

I’m sorry but a candidate for the U.S. Senate skateboarding around a fast-food restaurant parking lot at night? This is huge. This is generationally significant. Has there ever been a serious Senate candidate who can whirl around like this? Before I saw this I was thinking “Beto could win.” Now I’m thinking he probably will.

Last April I read a 2017 draft of Adam McKay‘s Vice, the Dick Cheney movie. (The script was called Cheney when McKay typed the title page; it was later called Backseat.) It struck me as a dark political horror comedy with a chuckly tone. A friend who read the same draft calls Backseat “a mixture of McKay, Deadpool and Armando Iannucci.”

One of the distinctive aspects of the ’17 draft were a couple of scenes in which Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife Lynn (Amy Adams) assess their situation in Shakespearean verse. I don’t recall if there were musical scenes in this draft but apparently one was shot.

In any event Vice (Annapurna, 12.14) research-screened last week in Los Angeles, and at least one guy who attended was enthusiastic.

“This is powerful political stuff,” he began. “A very didactic, matter-of-fact examination of Dick Cheney‘s empirical rise behind the scenes.

“McKay has removed the big comedic set-pieces from the film,” he added. “Missing from the new cut was an elaborate musical sequence and a substantial scene of Bale and Adams reciting Shakespeare. As it stands, the film still works. Now it’s just a more dramatic Big Short. It implements the same style of filmmaking (flashy editing and montage). Bale commits to a transformative performance, and Adams has two early volcanic scenes that can win her the Oscar. Steve Carell‘s Donald Rumsfeld is comic relief. And Sam Rockwell‘s George Bush is little more than a cameo — he appears in three scenes. Plays him as insecure and fragile as you’d hope.”

Before Thursday night’s Old Man & The Gun Manhattan premiere, star Robert Redford walked back his retirement.

“That was a mistake…I should never have said that,” Redford told a Variety reporter. “If I’m going to retire, I should just slip quietly away from acting, but I shouldn’t be talking about it because I think it draws too much attention in the wrong way. I want to be focused on this film and the cast.”

The reporter asked Redford to double-clarify and he said, “I’m not answering that…keep the mystery alive.”

Hollywood Elsewhere interpretation: Redford may or may not be hanging up his spurs, but I suspect he’s been told by either his publicist or Fox Searchlight reps to walk back the retirement thing. Why, I’m not sure. Presumably because they believe that on some level it detracts from interest in the film. I would think that paying audiences might make a special effort to see David Lowery’s light-hearted period romance given that it might be Redford’s last shot.

Imagine Alan Ladd‘s Shane clop-clopping on his horse and riding up into the mountains. Young Brandon DeWilde shouts out “Shane! Come back!” Shane stops, turns around, looks back at DeWilde and does just that. “You’ve convinced me, Joey,” he says. “I’ll stick around. What the hell, the bad guys are dead.”

Two and a half months from now critics will be deciding which 2018 films will go on their ten-best lists. Please don’t forget to include Stefanio Sollima‘s Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which will definitely be on my roster. In my book it’s a better film than Sicario because it isn’t saddled with Emily Blunt‘s weepy, overly emotional, pain-in-the-ass FBI agent and is therefore more appropriately focused on Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro‘s at-the-ready commando guys. The critics who didn’t upvote it (and thereby slapped it with a completely absurd 63% Rotten Tomato rating) are morons. I still don’t own a 4K Bluray player, but I love that a Bluray has been issued in this format. I streamed it last night…perfecto.

“Not Best Drug-Dealing Drama Since Traffic, But Close“, posted on 6.22.18:

By the standards of a violent drug-cartel drama and particularly those of a sequel in this realm, Stefano Sollima‘s Sicario: Day of the Soldado is, for me, a serious knockout. I can’t call it a great film, but I can certainly tag it as beautifully calibrated pulp with a surprisingly strong heart. Given what I expected due to the somewhat low Rotten Tomatoes score of 68% (due to bizarre pans by Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, TheWrap‘s William Bibbiani and Screen Crush‘s Matt Singer) it’s surprisingly, almost mind-blowingly good.

For me it’s much better than Denis Villenueve‘s Sicario, which was seriously compromised by Emily Blunt‘s tedious, pain-in-the-ass female FBI agent. Rock-steady, dead-on performances by Josh Brolin and particularly from Benicio del Toro and the young Isabela Moner anchor this sequel, which for me felt far more assured, poignant and suspenseful than the 2015 Villenueve film, which I never warmed to all that much. Not to mention more purely cinematic. You can just tell right away when a director really knows what he/she is doing, and this is one such occasion.

It was while watching the recently released Captain Marvel trailer that I realized I’m sick to death of hearing the line “you have no idea.” As in “you have no idea how much shit is about to come down.” Or “you have no idea what’s really going on here.” Or “you have no idea who I am or what I’ve been going through.” Samuel L. Jackson is the guy who says it in the trailer, and the instant I heard it I said “okay, that’s it, no more.”

I’ve always hated this line because the characters who say it don’t actually mean that the person they’re speaking to “has no idea” about this or that, which would be another way of saying they’re basically clueless. What they mean is that the person in question doesn’t have enough information, isn’t fully aware of all the angles or doesn’t know the whole equation. All I know is that from this point on, any movie in which a character says “you have no idea” is bad news, as in badly written, chock of cliches, hackneyed, “give me a break”, etc.

Again, the mp3.

Joaquin Pheonix will be a great Joker, most likely, but why are people pining for another Joker movie in the first place? How many Jokers and Joker flicks can the culture absorb before the seams start to fray and split open? Yes, it’s an origin story but weren’t we treated to the origins of Jack Nicholson‘s Joker in Tim Burton‘s original Batman? Not to mention Jared Leto gearing up for another Joker performance. There’s something diseased going on.

I’m sorry but the main thing I’m getting from Chevy Chase in this Washington Post video interview is “feeble, doddering, no longer sharp.” The water-dribbling-onto-the-T-shirt isn’t a bit — it’s an old guy whose physical coordination skills aren’t what they used to be. Chase is only 75, but he looks and sounds like he’ll be ready for assisted living in a couple of years. Hurt, angry, defensive. I’m sorry to say this but look at him, listen to him. His voice sounds a bit hazy and groggy — it doesn’t have that timbre, that snap any more. He needs to lose at least 75 or 80 pounds and go to Prague for some hair work.

A 9.20 Guardian article reports that Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, who has strongly endorsed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models.” The story reports that Chau has suggested to female students who wanted to work for Kavanaugh that they should “dress to exude a ‘model-like’ femininity.”

The article adds that Chau’s law-professor husband, Jed Rubenfeld, “told a prospective clerk that Kavanaugh liked a certain ‘look'” — a presumed allusion to a fashionably-dressed, hot-to-trot “fuck me” appearance.

Which indicates that the adult, judicially-focused Kavanaugh was looking for a certain atmosphere of tumescent arousal in his law office, and that right now he’s probably a middle-aged version of the 17-year-old horndog who tried to drunkenly have his way with Christine Blasey Ford back in the early ’80s.

Then again working with hotties is a standard Republican thing. We’re all aware that powerful right-wing guys tend to hire foxes — sexy, slender, alluring — and in many cases icy Nordic blondes, which is the template for pretty much every female Fox News employee.

Consider a 2.20.17 Guardian piece by Hadley Freeman called “Why Do All The Women on Fox News Look and Dress Alike? Republicans Prefer Blondes.” Freeman notes that right-wing women (i.e., Kellyanne Conway, Scottie Nell Hughes, Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ivanka Trump) all present “a uniform vision of girlishly long bottle-blond hair. [And they] all dress exactly the same, which is to say, mainstream feminine — dresses, not trousers; heels, not flats; no interesting cuts, just body-skimming, cleavage-hinting, not-scaring-the-horses tedium. These are the kind of women who take pride in saying things like ‘I’m not into fashion — I like style’, and by ‘style’ they mean ‘clothes that men like me to wear.'”

So yes, Kavanaugh is apparently a dog, but he isn’t an outlier — he’s just looking for the same kind of tingly stimulation from his female law clerks that Roger Ailes wanted from female Fox News staffers.

For what it’s worth, I once tried to help a pretty, dark-haired 20something woman — a good egg in my book — get a job interview with producer Don Simpson. I began by telling Simpson that she was sharp and well-educated with a disciplined social manner. Then I made the mistake of telling him she was good-looking. “In my experience that’s a negative,” Simpson replied. “Pretty women are accustomed to being flattered and catered to in certain ways. They’ve been told all their lives that the world will often defer to them or bend the rules to some extent, and so they’re not as hard-working and soldier-like as women who are are equally qualified but less attractive.”

Just mentioning that I knew and occasionally chatted with Simpson back in the ’90s is not a smart move on my part. Certain parties will shake their heads and conclude that anyone who was friendly with Simpson, whose attitudes toward women were reportedly problematic, might have similar issues. But I never spoke with Simpson about women or sex or anything in that realm; I loved talking to him because he was so shrewd and whip-smart about all the Hollywood players — who they were deep down, what their basic personalities and mindsets were, etc. I’ve mentioned the prejudice he had about interviewing attractive women for office or production jobs to point out that at least Simpson, who’s been dead for 22 years now, was no Brett Kavanaugh.

Trailer narration for The Oath: “How did this reasonable, mild-mannered husband and wife end up like this? One word: family.”

The trailer lies. In fact, the one-word answer is “Trump”. A corresponding five-word answer is “creeping Nazi Germany-like fascism.” Coupled with a pair of brothers with diametrically opposed views on a recently-requested government loyalty oath, which is only a step or two removed from reality.

One brother (played by director-producer-writer Ike Barinholz) is quite sensibly appalled; the other (or “bad”) brother supports the thinking behind the oath. Mix, combust, fireworks, FBI guys, chaos.

The Oath, which looks and feels a little raggedy, will premiere on 9.25 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. I don’t know how good Barinholz’s film is, but the fact that a raucous family comedy has a fascistic premise at all is obviously a portrait of contemporary white American culture, at least to some extent.

As a longtime admirer of John Landis‘s Schlock (or at least of certain inspired portions), it’s comforting to announce that Arrow is releasing a 4K restoration Bluray of this low-budget 1973 monster comedy, on 10.16.18.

I’ve never understood why Landis, who directed, wrote and played the lead role, continues to refer to Schlock as “bad and appropriately named.” It was cheaply made — shot in only 12 days for $60K — but three or four scenes in this dopey little film are a lot funnier than The Blues Brothers and only slightly less funny than National Lampoon’s Animal House. If you’re stoned.

Schlock is more than a genre spoof — it’s a combination of stoner humor and social satire in the vein of the old, occasionally surrealist Ernie Kovacs show of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The below video clip (go to 3:11) contains a scene in which Schlock tears apart an orange beater in a parking lot, and it’s pure Laurel & Hardy.

The form-fitting ape suit, obviously inspired by the “Dawn of Man” apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was designed by Rick Baker. Baker had almost no money to work with, and yet he did a pretty good job. And Landis’s performance is a lot of fun.

I don’t know why it took so long for a Bluray to appear, but I wonder if the March 2017 death of original rights holder Jack Harris had something to do with it.

The above clip was shot at The Old Place, a storied restaurant in the hills above Malibu. It begins slowly but hang in there. The blind virtuoso with a Zen attitude is played by Ian Kranitz.

Over the last few years I’ve learned to be wary of anything Dan Fogelman has had a hand in. I didn’t mind Last Vegas, which Fogelman wrote, but I pretty much hated Danny Collins, which he directed and wrote. I’ve therefore ducked screenings of Fogelman’s Life Itself (Amazon, 9.21), and apparently with good reason.

Fogelman’s latest has gotten creamed on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, earning respective ratings of 12% and 19%. As you might expect, Fogelman has called out the white-guy critical establishment for the usual usual.

“White male critics don’t like anything that has any emotion,” he recently told TooFab. “It’s concerning because it is important. It tells people what to go see. I think that the people with the widest reach are getting increasingly cynical and vitriolic. Something is inherently a little bit broken in our film criticism right now.”

Life Itself may or may not be a problematic film, but Fogelman isn’t wrong about critics disliking films with strong emotional currents. Or at least those saddled with a sense of taste. Being one of them, I can say they definitely prefer the use of suggestion, understatement and deft, darting brush strokes. They definitely tend to push back if the emotional gush is turned on too heavily. This is how anyone with cultivated taste buds would respond.

It’s also true about film critics being made up of mostly older white guys. And yet, as World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy has pointed out, many of the negative reviews were from female critics. Of the 19 female film critics who’ve reviewed Life Itself on Rotten Tomatoes, 17 wrote pans.