As a regular moviegoer have I shown limited interest over the years in films about characters who are not like me in this or that way? I’m probably guilty of this. Anyone who says they aren’t at least initially interested in movies that reflect their lives, interests, gender, income level and appearance to some extent is a little bit of a liar.

On the other hand I’m not sure I’d want to see a film about a married Los Angeles movie columnist who drives a rumbling two-wheeled beast and goes to film festivals. I know all about that. If I’m sitting down with a container of popcorn I’d rather sink into a milieu that feels a wee bit exotic.

I’ll tell you right now I would probably be reluctant to sit down with an early ’80s comedy about three obese, none-too-bright Samoan guys who work at the local Target and want nothing more than to party and get laid. Nor would I be all that keen on watching the story of a dull, pudgy married guy from Iowa who…fuck it, I don’t want to hang with anyone who can’t show a little dietary discipline. Seriously. People like that bother me unless they’re canny or clever or extra-witty, like Jonah Hill in Superbad or War Dogs or The Wolf of Wall Street….pretty much any Jonah movie.

But I will nearly always take a chance with well-made, well-reviewed films about characters of almost any shape, ethnicity, political outlook or income level, and especially those with drive and determination and higher-than-average brain cell counts.

I really am a sucker for Metacritic scores in the 80s and 90s. If I have an option of seeing, on one hand, a movie about a dirt-poor farming family struggling to bring in a crop in 1930s Texas and on the other a film about a dirt-poor farming family struggling to bring in a crop in 1940s Mississippi, I’ll probably take a chance with the Texas flick first because I’ve read everywhere that it’s, like, way better than the Mississippi one….no offense.

And I’ll definitely risk seeing a film about people who aren’t like me if they have at least one of two things going for them — innate intelligence or nerve. I can’t stand films in which the main characters are too dumb or stubborn or emotionally blocked to figure out the rules of survival and therefore can’t or won’t figure out a strategy that will move their situation along. As long as the main characters (even criminals or shitkicker types) have some kind of half-sensible plan, I’m on their side.

If you want to know what was happening in the award race two or three weeks ago, check with the Gurus of Gold. They’ve always been safe betters, like retirees having fun at Santa Anita with their social security checks. They’re slow in catching up with trends and bends in the road. Cautious, stodgy.

They’re all still projecting, for example, that Darkest Hour‘s Gary Oldman is the likeliest winner of the Best Actor race. Not one Guru is betting on Timothy Chalamet? Oldman might win in the end, but Chalamet has clearly had the momentum in recent weeks. Are the Gurus even aware of this?

I’m cool with a majority believing that Lady Bird may win the Best Picture Oscar, as Greta Gerwig‘s film is one of HE’s three Best Picture standouts, the other two being Dunkirk and Call Me By Your Name. Yes, the vote for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is very close to Lady Bird, but the Gurus don’t seem to be channeling a damn thing. David Poland and Susan Wloszczyna have Billboards at the top of their lists. A fair number of them haven’t even voted for (seen?) Phantom Thread.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is the only Guru who thinks The Shape of Water might take the prize. Howell was the only Guru who last year predicted a Best Picture win for Moonlight.

When I read the below tweet an hour ago, I told myself that if it checks out this might be the first thing this raging blowhard has claimed to have done that I half-approve of. I felt badly about admitting this, but if Trump’s Middle Eastern fighting tactics had really made a difference, I had to give him fair credit.

Then I read a 10.25 Washington Post article that evaluated a similar claim that Trump made on 10.13.17, which was that his administration had “done more against ISIS in nine months than the previous administration has done during its whole administration — by far, by far.” Reporter Glenn Kessler determined that Trump’s claim was mostly about exaggeration and hyperbole, although tactical changes ordered by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have “resulted in an acceleration of the coalition meeting its objectives.”

I took this shot of a huge black-and-white fashion poster (possibly for Calvin Klein jeans) seven or eight years ago. It was right on Fifth Avenue around 53rd Street, give or take. Right smack dab in the middle of tourist-ville, and nobody said anything because the aesthetic was gayish without being queer. Last weekend artist Carolina Falkholt painted a huge red johnson on the side of a building on Soho’s Broome St., but it was soon painted over due to neighborhood complaints. I understand why Falkholt went there (she had the Robert Mapplethorpe precedent to consider, and she had to at least out-provoke Calvin Klein) but nobody likes queer art interfering with the general urban neutrality. That includes me.

Six days ago Danny Peary posted a q & a with author, film historian, screenwriter and former Variety critic Joseph McBride. The main order of discussion was McBride’s 2017 book, “Two Cheers for Hollywood,” a compilation volume (64 essays and interviews) that I mentioned eight months ago in a piece called “McBride’s Way”.

Right in the middle of Peary’s piece is a 42 year-old photo of McBride, future Variety and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and directors Sam Fuller and Francois Truffaut. It’s a poorly cropped, bad-angle shot — you can only see one-third of McBride at far right — but it was taken in late ’75 at an event that McCarthy helped organize on behalf of the promotion of Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H.. McCarthy was handling publicity for the film as well as the so-called Oscar campaign for Best Actress contender Isabelle Adjani. At the end of the day McCarthy’s boss, the notoriously cheap Roger Corman of New World Pictures, paid for two FYC trade ads for Adjani.

(l. to r.) Francois Truffaut, Samuel Fuller (where did Sam find that Kiwanis Club sport jacket?), Todd McCarthy, Joe McBride.

McCarthy’s campaign was nonetheless successful. Adjani was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in early ’76 (although Louise Fetcher won for her Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). In late ’75 Adjani won Best Actress trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, and from the National Society of Film Critics in early ’76.

McCarthy’s recollection: “The event happened at the AFI when it was still up at the Doheny/Greystone mansion. I invited all the great old directors in Hollywood, ostensibly to get them to rally around the film for Oscars but privately so I could meet them all. Attending alongside Truffaut and Fuller were George Cukor, King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, Alexander Mackendrick and numerous others like Buck Henry, Milos Forman, et al. Quite a night. This was the first time I’d met Truffaut, and while the film was screening we sat outside and all he wanted to talk about was Watergate — he felt he didn’t understand it and American politics sufficiently so he pumped me for endless information so he could better comprehend was going on.”

McBride on general cultural downturn and betrayal: “I feel I was betrayed by the movies, as I was by the Catholic Church, my parents, my schooling, and our government. It’s hard not to continue loving the movies I once loved, though, as well as some occasional new ones. My feelings about the medium today are highly ambivalent. I feel in a sense I went into the wrong profession.

“But my interests have always been broad, and I’ve incorporated them into my work. My biographies of directors range widely into sociopolitical subjects, and I recently have been branching out into books on other subjects besides movies. So I can’t regret the choices I made as a youth (once you make them, it’s almost impossible to turn back), but the art form I loved [has] been trashed and turned largely into moronic fodder for the adolescent male audience, [and that] makes me beyond sad.”

Variety‘s Kris Tapley has posted his first Oscar nomination guesses of the season. In so doing he’s helping to promote a scenario in which his favorites (which he’s presumably decided upon, at least partly, after chatting up Academy members) will in fact be nominated. He’s helping, in other words, to confirm their legitimacy and favoring odds. As many of us (myself included) try to do during awards season.

But I am really and truly stunned that Tapley is apparently hearing and therefore “guessing” that Woody Harrelson‘s amiable, low-key sheriff in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri as well as Richard Jenkins‘ emotionally frustrated gay guy in The Shape of Water are more likely to snag a Best Supporting Actor nomination than Call Me By Your Name‘s Michael Stuhlbarg, for his performance as one of the wisest and most supportive dads in cinema history.

Stuhlbarg’s fatherly advice scene with Timothee Chalamet doesn’t move audiences — it melts them down, and I’m not just talking about the LGBT community. We’re all read the comments, heard the stories. Stuhlbarg’s gentle speech is a Beatrice Straight one-off — the kind of scene everyone talks about. If there’s another scene in any of the big award-season films that has wowed people to this degree, I’d like to know what it is. Good and admired as they are, Jenkins and Harrelson don’t come close to matching, much less surpassing, what Stuhlbarg delivers.

And yet Tapley is suggesting that Stuhlbarg’s CMBYN costar, Armie Hammer, will take one of the five Best Supporting Actor noms — a nomination that has Stuhlbarg’s name on it! Sure, Hammer might be nominated. He’s awfully good in Luca Guadagnino‘s film and has certainly “worked” the town enough. But c’mon.

It goes without saying that The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe and Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell are In Like Flynn.

This is how I live my life, 1/8 of a mile at a time. Before I know it I’ve gone a whole mile without a blowout or running out of gas or being sideswiped by another vehicle. And then another mile. And then it’s time to crash. Pull over, I mean, and get some shut-eye. The sun comes up the next day and I submit to the same drill. Eyes on the road, sensible speeds, both hands on the wheel, etc.

I’ve watched the five-year-old MGM Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment a couple of times and I’ve never said to myself, “This is nice but it could look better.” Well, I suppose the 2012 disc could do with a little less DNR heightening, but to my plebian eyes it’s always looked great — extra-sharp detail, rich array of monochrome tones, mine-shaft blacks.

Why then did I pop for the new 4K restored Arrow Bluray version, which will arrive at the end of the week? Because Arrow techs rolled up their sleeves and worked with the original camera negative to restore this 1960 film. They applied standard restoration techniques (dirt and scratch removal, image stabilization, etc.) and presumably delivered a more film-like final product.

But mainly I fell for the Arrow sell. I wanted to believe that I’d notice significant improvements over the 2012 Bluray (i.e., a “bump”), and so I invested in that dream, however likely that may be.

David Brook of blueprintrreview says “the remastered print looks fantastic — clean, detailed and featuring a beautiful dynamic contrast range.”

A critic with fanboydestroy reviewed the Arrow disc about ten days ago: “As I haven’t seen the MGM Bluray version, the new Arrow Academy restoration is probably going to be the go-to version for a while. Using a combination of digital and standard restoration techniques, the film looks phenomenal…all cleaned up for higher resolution 4K sets.”

I’ve been saying all along that Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Magnolia, 12.27) is a gripping, must-see melodrama, and that Diane Kruger‘s fierce, emotionally raw performance — she plays a widow seeking vengeance against neo-Nazi terrorists who’ve murdered her son and Turkish-born husband — absolutely warrants a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

This grim but compelling German-lanugage drama, which has been shortlisted for the 2017 Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, finally opens tomorrow in Los Angeles (West L.A.’s Royal) and New York (IFC Center, Landmark at 57 West).

In The Fade is much better film than the aggregate critic scores — 60% from Metacritic, 63% from Rotten Tomatoes — would have you think. I know when a film is nailing it true and straight, and there’s no question that Akin’s film is worth seeing at a theatre, paying for parking. buying the popcorn, etc.

In The Fade director, producer and screenwriter Fatih Akin during a recent chat the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills.

From my 10.4.17 review: “Set mostly in Hamburg, Fade starts with Katja (Kruger), her clean-living Kurdish/Turkish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) with a drug-dealing past, and their young son Rocco in happy-family mode. That lasts less than ten minutes. A home-made nail bomb outside Nuri’s office explodes, and Katja is suddenly a child-less widow. She wilts under agonizing pain and a near-total emotional meltdown, and understandably decides to temporarily medicate with drugs, and then nearly ends it all by slitting her wrists.

“But then a suspicion she’d shared with her attorney, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), about anti-immigrant Nazis having planted the bomb turns out to be accurate. Katja learns that evidence she had given the police has led to the arrest of Andre and Edda Moller (Ulrich Brandhoff, Hanna Hilsdorf), a pair of young neo-Nazis with international connections. There’s no doubt these two are the culprits — Katja had seen Edda leave a bicycle near her husband’s office two or three hours before the blast.

“Then comes a second-act portion dealing with a trial of the accused that doesn’t end satisfactorily, and finally a third act in which the acutely frustrated Katja travels to Greece to carry out her own form of revenge-justice.

During my first viewing of Dunkirk I kept thinking back to this Atonement tracking shot. Why the hell were they shooting those horses? The image of that far-off rotating ferris wheel is brilliant. Technical bravura for technical bravura’s sake? Not for me — Wright didn’t just capture the entire Dunkirk sprawl but told several little “stories” as the camera floated along. Director Joe Wright was the king of the world when this shot was captured 11 years ago; Darkest Hour is full of vigor and rich compositions, but no one scene rivals this. Hats off to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.

Variety has asked a few critics to riff on some 2018 films they’re especially looking forward to. The list contains two forehead-slappers — Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One and Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. (If you can’t tell what the latter has in store by way of last month’s trailer, you need to watch it again.) Leave it to Peter Debruge to speak excitedly of these.

Amy Nicholson has singled out Alex Garland‘s Annihilation, but you know that Paramount’s decision to preview it at last March’s Cinemacon and then push it into an early ’18 release indicates some kind of droop factor.

I was confused by Richard Kuipers‘ mention of Anthony Maras‘ The Palace, a thriller about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, as it’s been referred to as Hotel Mumbai for the last year or so.

Roma director Alfonso Cuaron during a March 2017 press conference about the end of filming.

I completely share Owen Gleiberman‘s excitement about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows and Damien Chazelle‘s First Man.

HE’s leading ’18 hotties (apart from the Cuaron, Chazelle, Farhadi and Singer): Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria, Adam McKay‘s Backseat, Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro (life of Silvio Berlusconi), Paul Verhoeven‘s Blessed Virgin and Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, a drama set in pre-WWI Budapest. (14)