Posted from 35,000 feet, American Airlines flight from JFK to Las Vegas: Over the years I’ve developed an ability — call it a knack — of reading between the lines of Venice Film Festival reviews, and thereby discerning what’s really being said. Because there’s often a certain amount of political deference and ass-covering mumbo jumbo in any trade review of any Venice premiere.

Case in point: Those overly obliging Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews of Downsizing, posted from Venice. It wasn’t until that Alexander Payne film hit Telluride that a few cut-the-crap assessments (including my own) began to be posted.

I’ve also developed sensors (i.e., insect antennae) that can spot movies aimed at film snobs a mile away — highly intelligent films with an ultra-refined or uncompromised aesthetic that just lifts you out of your seat (i.e., Cold War). Except sometimes they’re coupled with a lack of interest in providing any semblance of an emotionally engaging current or, failing that, at least an attempt to meet the viewer halfway.

We all know what dweeb cinema is and we all know what dweeb elites look and talk and dress like. They’re a breed apart, a club, a cloistered semi-secret order with their own way of being and relating, a fraternity that insists that applicants prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are fundamentally opposed to the concept of commonly-defined movie pleasure.

That said, I wouldn’t want to live in a world without film snobs because their influence delivers a much-needed cultural counter-balance to philistine-idiot popcorn movies. (Note: portions of the preceding were originally posted in a piece called “Dweeb Manifesto,” dated 11.29.15.)

I caught Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts (HBO, 9.24) during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and fell for it big-time. It’s fairly conventional in the vein of any number of comprehensive, smoothly professional feature-doc portraits that we’ve all seen before, and yet unique in that it microscopes Jane Fonda‘s journey, breaking it down into a five-act structure and delivering, in a very intimate and relatable sense, an epic 80-year saga.

Four of the five decades were shaped or strongly influenced by the men in her life, she admits; it’s only the current fifth chapter in which Fonda has totally stood her own ground.

Every now and then you run into people you feel a special current with, and Fonda, for me, is one of them. Largely, I guess, because we were both raised by dismissive, emotionally aloof fathers and have more or less educated ourselves, and I don’t know what else…similar cockatoo attitudes about food, a certain alertness of mind, a fill-the-schedule attitude?

Her aura is steady and…what, steely? Tough, tenacious, non-retiring, pays close attention. You have a feeling she’d be okay in an earthquake.

I could talk about 150 different subjects with Fonda and barely scratch the surface. I could ask her 30 or 40 questions about every movie she’s been in, and plenty about films I’ve heard she considered but never made. I could ask her about those 1965 beach parties at Roddy McDowall‘s home. I could ask her about Warren Beatty. I could ask her about everyone, everything…the Klute shoot with Donald Sutherland, that visit with Harvey Milk, her experiences with Sydney Pollack (whom I knew somewhat), making Barefoot in the Park with Redford, why she decided not to do Cameron Crowe‘s Elizabethtown. (Smart decision as it turned out.)

One of my all time favorite films of the aughts, written by Ted Griffin and Nicholas Griffin: Clip #1 and clip #2.

Posted 15 years ago: There’s no such thing as a very good or great movie that brings people down, regardless of subject matter. ‘Sad’ or ‘solemnly moving’ is not the same thing as “depressing.” There’s nothing lower in the movie-watching universe than the kind of person who sits through Au Hasard Balthazar and comes out saying ‘whoa, bummer…the donkey died.’

The only truly depressing movie experience is when you’re watching something gross, tacky, incompetent or ineffective.

Life can be hard, cruel, oppressive, boring…but it’s all we’ve got to hold onto and it’s better than being dead.

Movies that relay or reflect basic truths will never be depressing, but those that tell lies of omission by way of fanciful bullshit always poison the air.

Sadness in good movies is not depressing — it’s just a way of re-experiencing honest hurt. Ordinary People is sad, but if you think it’s depressing as in ‘lemme outta here’ there’s something wrong with you.

I’ll give you depressing: living a rich full life (children, compassion, wealth, adventure) and then dying at a ripe old age and coming back (i.e., reincarnated) as a chicken at a Colonel Sanders chicken ranch.

My beef is with movies that impart a distinct feeling of insanity by way of delirium or delusion, or a bizarre obsession. Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile (turn on the current! smell that burning flesh! cuddle that cute mouse!) and The Majestic (rancid small-town “folksiness”) are two such films. Ditto Steven Spielberg’s Always.

Martin Scorsese’s Kundun isn’t a downer. It’s worse than that — it’s paralyzing. And yet Scorsese made one of the greatest spiritual-high movies ever with The Last Temptation of Christ.

On the other hand, Marty sent thousands upon thousands of moviegoers into states of numbing depression when Sharon Stone gave Joe Pesci a blowjob in Casino.

Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis’ film about a lush who’s decides to drink himself to death and doesn’t quit until he succeeds, has never been and never will be depressing. If you’re engaged to someone who thinks it is, tell him or her it’s over — you’ll be divorcing them eventually, so you might as well cut to the chase.

Every couple of years I mention Frank Perry‘s still-inaccessible Play It As It Lays. I’ve been writing about it for 15 years, and you still can’t stream it. Based on a Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, this angsty, slowly-sinking-into-the-Hollywood-swamp thing has always been an offbeat feminist film, but somehow it never got sufficient credit for that. Tuesday Weld‘s Maria (pronounced “Mar-EYE-ah”) is a wealthy gloomhead, but she’s constantly skeptical of the men in her life as well as the male-dominated film industry. Mocking, dismissive, disengaged. I wonder how today’s heightened, enlightened industry consciousness would process a remake? The #MeToo community would approve. A fair number of critics cheered when it opened in the fall of ’72, but it only made a million bucks.

Is Suspiria to Luca Guadagnino what The Women was to George Cukor? I don’t know why I just wrote that. I’ve heard that Suspiria contains a striking en masse nude scene (all women, all ages and shapes). Given that this trailer is more of a show-and-tell than the last one and especially considering that this Amazon release will soon debut at the Venice Film Festival, I’m a little surprised there isn’t more of a taste of this. Another entry in the proud tradition of elevated horror — Personal Shopper, Hereditary, A Quiet Place, The Babadook, etc.

Incidentally: Word around the campfire is that The Nightingale, the latest from Babadook director Jennifer Kent, may run into critical barbs when it debuts in Venice on Wednesday, 9.5. Maybe. Which, if it happens, would be a shame. The Nightingale is the ONLY woman-directed film accepted into Venice competition.

I’m peddling down a country road on my red Schwinn, cruising in an imaginary bike lane, careful not to stray into that portion of the road that belongs to cars. There are two kinds of drivers who pass me. One, confident, steady-as-they-go types (usually guys between their 20s and 50s) who come within, say, three or four feet of my “bike lane.” Which is no biggie because they know how to drive, etc. And two, middle-aged and older women who veer a good 10 to 12 feet to the left, going almost entirely into the opposing-traffic lane because they’re so fearful of the possibility of clipping me.

We can’t all be Mario Andretti or Paul Newman — I get that — but whenever one of these nervous nellies swerves to the left as if they’re avoiding a dead moose in the road, I can’t help but regard them with a dismissive head-shake.

…from the latest Bond franchise flick is of marginal interest because Bond films are (a) wanks, (b) outliers, (c) cultural anomalies, (d) the cinematic equivalent of a northern Atlantic iceberg, seen from a passing ocean liner at 4:30 am, (e) utterly lacking in any kind of social echo or reflection factor, and therefore glorious and vital, (f) harmless, (g) the original jizz-whizz experience, (h) one of the last surviving expressions of the 20th Century Anglo Saxon rogue male aesthetic, and therefore a kind of odd window into that JFK– or Hugh Hefner-reflecting mentality or consciousness, (i) fun to keep around from a Smithsonian Museum cultural nostalgia viewpoint, (j) mainly about augmenting the financial portfolios of Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who, like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco, always want “more”, (k) the movie equivalent of a vinyl 33 that keeps skipping and repeating the same song fragment, over and over and over, (l) would feel superficially rejuvenated if Daniel Craig were to be replaced by Donald Glover or, perversely, the Sean Connery-like Henry Cavill, which would be interpreted in SJW circles as a gesture of damn-the-torpedoes cultural defiance, (m) one of the leading antitheses of the age-old maxim that you can’t reap financial gain if you don’t take a risk.

You can tell right away that Mahershala Ali is going to be extra good in this. His character, Don Shirley, reminds me of James Baldwin. Viggo Mortensen‘s Tony Lip feels a little broad, maybe a little too predictably Sopranos-like, but Mortensen is too good of an actor to rely on stock cliches. Select Manhattan journos got an early looksee at Green Book this evening; presumably the same access is being offered in Los Angeles as we speak. I have a very good feeling about this.

HE’s Google-powered search engine has always worked well enough, but maybe I need to upgrade it or something. Because it’s a little bit stupid.

Last night I searched for my review of Susanna Nicchiarelli‘s Nico, 1988, which is currently playing at the Film Forum. (Here it is.) I’ve found that the engine works better if you use just one term, so I typed in “Nico”. The first thing it found were articles mentioning Nicolas Roeg (brilliant) and then Nicole Kidman (get the pattern?), Nicolas Cage, Nicole Holofcener, etc.. Then it finally explored articles mentioning the Teutonic blonde who sang with the Velvet Underground. You’d think that the search term “Nico” would bring up Nico articles first and then pieces on Roeg, Kidman and Cage, but no.

Nico, by the way, was going with the late Brian Jones around the time of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Nico was 5’10 and Jones was 5’6″. I don’t think I could do that.

I had to focus on some non-column stuff today. Happens every so often. I try to never miss a day, etc.