Speaking as one who’s had problems with Steven Spielberg films (or at least with the manipulative lather and chain-pullings that Spielberg has insinctually applied) for the entire 21st Century and a good part of the 20th, The Post, a smartly written, well-performed tale of how and why Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) decided to man up and a grow a pair in the thick of the Pentagon Papers episode of June 1971, is far and away my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan, which opened 19 and 1/2 years ago. Call it Spielberg’s best, certainly his least problematic, in two decades.

The critical verdict hasn’t been unanimous but I fell for it, and I mean all the way through and not just during the manipulative third act, which, if you have any stored-up sentiment about the glory days of 20th century print-and-ink journalism, will definitely melt you down. I knew I was being sold a Spielbergian bill of goods but I bought it anyway.  I gushed out some thoughts the day after, and a New York friend replied, “Calm down, Tonto…it’s very good but not great.”

The Post is a real “Spielberg film” in some ways, but it’s much smarter, better written (cheers to Liz Hannah and especially Josh Singer, who, I’m told, did a page-one rewrite of Hannah’s original spec draft), more persuasive and much more compellingly performed than Lincoln or Bridge of Spies or anything else Spielberg has made this century. 

As much as I tend to resist Spielbergian devices (including his frequent habit of leaning on a swelling John Williams score), this one caught me. I knew I was being sold a bill of goods, that I was being asked to submit to an emotional tale about good-guy journalists in the tradition of Newsfront, Deadline USA and Jack Webb’s -30-, but I bought it. 

There’s a third-act moment on the steps of the Supreme Court when Streep walks down into a crowd of gazing, admiring women…I’m not going to describe it any further but it really works, and (honestly?) it even made me choke up a bit. I’m naturally inclined to like any rigorously realistic film about good-guy journalists, but The Post delivered the strongest emotional experience I’ve had with any ’17 film since my initial Sundance viewing of Call Me By Your Name and my early September viewing of Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird.

This is why I think the Best Picture Oscar is going to come down to a choice between one of these three. I’m in the tank for Luca Guadagnino, of course, but if the Academy goes for The Post or Lady Bird, I will at least understand.

“Adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella, You Were Never Really Here stars a heavily bearded Joaquin Phoenix as a severely troubled, hammer-wielding assassin whose latest job will either kill him or give him a reason to keep living. What follows is a kind of 21st century riff on Taxi Driver that morphs, by the end, into a stealth art-house remake of Logan — a deranged odyssey across a wide-ranging New York hellscape that combines sleek formal elegance, fatalistic humor, unsparing violence and another gorgeously unnerving score by Jonny Greenwood.

“[Director Lynne] Ramsay’s unwillingness to compromise artistically has often run afoul of a bottom-line-minded industry, which explains why <em>You Were Never Really Here</em> is only her fourth film in the 18 years since her brilliant, Cannes-premiered debut feature, <em>Ratcatcher</em>. Her return seals her standing as one of our most fearless and forceful filmmakers, if not one as prolific as she deserves to be.” — from Justin Chang‘s review, posted in the Los Angeles Times on 6.1.17.

Posted on 7.6.15: “This may not pass muster with traditional Western devotees (i.e, readers of Cowboys & Indians) but arguably one of the most influential westerns ever made is Johnny Concho (’56), a stagey, all-but-forgotten little film that Frank Sinatra starred in and co-produced. For this modest black-and-white enterprise was the first morally revisionist western in which a big star played an ethically challenged lead character — i.e., a cowardly bad guy.” Here’s the rest of the piece:

George Sidney’s Annie Get Your Gun opened at Leows’ State on 5.17.50.

Dick Powell’s The Conqueror, the Utah-shot battle epic that led to a few cast members getting cancer, opened at the Criterion in March 1956.

Sometime in early 1955.

What a piece of shit Ice Station Zebra is, and I’m saying that as an admirer of macho director John Sturges. I love Alan Spencer‘s story about Ice Station Zebra showing on a long flight that Sturges was on, and a fellow passenger complaining that the flight would end before the film did, and Sturges wanting to tell the passenger “you don’t know how lucky you are.” Howard Hughes‘ favorite all-time movie? Really? Spencer says Patrick McGoohan is the best in the film; “has all the best lines.” A North Pole movie shot on a backlot in California.

What a wonderful world we’re living in…really! Sen. Al Franken, my biggest liberal hero and a Grateful Dead fan to boot, is apparently contemplating resignation over some bad behavior (groping) while rightwing Alabama nutbag Roy Moore, an alleged child molestor, is about to defeat his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. Terrific!

Inappropriate sexual behavior shouldn’t be tolerated under any situation or circumstance, particularly when it comes to elected officials. With a seventh woman having now complained about gropings from Sen. Al Franken and with two dozen Senators now calling on him to step down, things are looking pretty bad for the guy.

One of the complaints against Franken stems from an incident that happened after he was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in June 2009. That alleged pawing of a married woman’s ass, I mean, at a Minnesota State Fair in August 2010. Which is too bad. Because if Franken’s behavior had been totally spotless since he assumed office eight and a half years ago, that might be a factor in assessing his appropriate course of action. From the strict standpoint of U.S. Senate rules and regulations, Franken’s behavior prior to being sworn in is not the Senate’s business.

But it is, unfortunately, because of that Minnesota State Fair incident. Or so I understand. Franken is probably a dead man. My heart is broken.

Sometime during the wee hours embers from the Ventura fire began to encroach upon the Sepulveda Blvd. area of Bel Air, blackening the hills west of the 405 and presumably threatening the Getty Museum. Flames were actually leaping out of the darkened Bel Air and Brentwood topography. I went outside this morning and looked up and saw nothing but blue skies. [Three photos below video.] It’s nonetheless odd to think of the fringes of the western region of Bel Air actually being under siege, or something close to that.

Just outside my doorway — 12.6, 8:55 am.

Five or six days ago a Vanity Fair piece discussed the 152-minute length of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15), and particularly Mark Hamill‘s reaction to the length and the film as whole. Hamill says “it’s like The Godfather [and therefore] doesn’t feel that long.”

What he meant, I gather, is that Jedi is sufficiently engaging so that you’re not looking at your watch every 15 minutes. But I was also upset to read a declaration near the end of the piece that “the story has a happy ending.” Hamill’s “story” of the movie’s? I’m afraid to ask.

If it’s the latter, thanks to Hamill and Vanity Fair for stabbing me in the heart. So much for any hopes I might have had about The Last Jedi being some kind of Empire Strikes Back-like cliffhanger installment, which is usually what a middle chapter does. The plot thickens or darkens, the odds get tougher, the outcome is in doubt. Nope — “a happy ending” is assured.

I’ve just watched a relatively recent essay on screwball comedies, assembled for the “One Hundred Years of Cinema” series. Farcical, fast-paced stories about class conflicts, filled with nervy, eccentric characters and usually involving a romance of one kind or another…right? Most of us associate screwball comedies with the ’30s and early ’40s (It Happened One Night, Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, Nothing Sacred, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels). And yet the British narrator says screwball comedies actually lasted until the mid ’50s (i.e., 1952’s Monkey Business, 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire, 1955’s The Seven Year Itch). When did screwball comedies end and spunky, slapstickish comedies begin? Were No Time for Sergeants and Operation Mad Ball screwball or just comedies with broad, outrageous material? Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot sure felt screwballish in ’59, and that went double for One, Two, Three two years later. By the time Peter Bogdanovich‘s What’s Up, Doc came along in ’72 it was regarded solely as a genre tribute, a throwback. I think it’s better to define the screwball era as (a) primarily inspired by the Great Depression, and (b) starting in ’34 and ending nine or ten years later. Screwballish comedies that came later…well, just call them comedies with bounce and attitude.

Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star who now and then portrayed laid-back, chain-smoking cool cats in French films from the early ’60s until this year (his last role was in Claude Lelouch‘s Chacun sa vie et son intime conviction), has died at age 74.

If you ask me Hallyday’s most interesting film was Patrice Leconte‘s The Man on the Train (’02), in which he costarred with Jean Rochefort.

I first heard of Hallyday in ’76, during my first trip to Paris. In the late ’90s I almost attended one of his concerts at the Stade de France stadium outside Paris.

Hallyday had intense wolf eyes. He looked like a wolf, howled like a wolf, prowled like a wolf. When he got older he had facial “work” done, and this made him look more wolf-like than some actual wolves in the forest.

Hallyday always seemed to be smoking unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes. If I had to spitball I would guess that he inhaled a bare minimum of 25,000 packs of Gauloises over a 60-year period, or a grand total of 1,500,000 cigarettes from his mid teens onward. At least.

When it comes to passionate love stories, there are two laws or conditions that make them seem especially memorable or magnetic. One, the best love stories are those which don’t end happily. (The late Sydney Pollack pointed this out time and again.) And two, love stories seem more passionate if the lovers never get around to actually doing it.

I’m not about to invest hours of research, but I’ll guess that a majority of anyone’s favorite love stories, from Wuthering Heights to Brief Encounter to Once, have been unconsummated. I would further guess that a list of popular love affair movies that have included actual sex would probably be fairly short.

I dove into this because it hit me this afternoon that one of the craziest and most erotically charged on-screen love affairs, the one between James Stewart‘s Scotty Ferguson and Kim Novak‘s Judy Barton (a.k.a. Madeleine Elster) in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo, never included the nasty. They made out under the Muir redwoods and along the Pacific coast and yes, Scotty did undress Judy/Madelyn after she passed out following a drowning attempt, but they never got down.

Who else abstained? Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, of course in Brief Encounter, as well as Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in that 1984 remake, Falling In Love. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (’57). Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson in Lost in Translation. Humphrey Bogart‘s Phillip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall‘s Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep. Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn in The Rainmaker (’56). Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. Michael Caine and Julie Waters in Educating Rita.

Others? Does it matter? I could go on and on.

When I say “the Get Out cabal” I’m not talking about the critics who are crazy for Jordan Peele’s horror-thriller. If they want to call this modestly clever allegory about racial relations one of the year’s best, fine. Earlier today a Sight & Sound poll of 2017’s finest films had Get Out in the #1 slot…terrific.

Daniel Kaluha in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

No, I’m talking about the editors of God-knows-how-many online film sites who’ve been using that same infuriating still of Get Out star Daniel Kaluya. You know the one I mean, doing his shocked-and-horrified thing. I’ve been looking at this photo since last February, and they won’t quit using it.

Kaluya is a handsome smoothie with eyes that are sly and sleepy-sexy (he almost has a Robert Mitchum thing going on) and, as Chris Washington, a look of settled confidence. But this photo couldn’t argue more strenuously with that vibe. And why is Kaluya crying? Who tears up when suburban demons are looking to turn you into a zombie? Would Steve McQueen cry if bad guys were trying to vacuum his mind?

I knew the Sight & Sound dweebs would give Ben and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time a high rating (#7 on a list of 25). HE nonethless approves of Call Me By Your Name occupying slot #3, Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Loveless in slot #8, and several other inclusions — Dunkirk (#9), The Florida Project (#10), A Ghost Story (#11), BPM (#12), Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (#13), Lady Bird (#19) and Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, etc.

This refers, obviously, to the sexual abuse allegations that have been directed at Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore. Earlier today Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic opponent, said that “he did his part as a prosecutor to ensure that men who hurt little girls should go to jail and not the United States Senate.” Posted today by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes. “Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her print cartoons and the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for 2016. Her first book, ‘Humor’s Edge’, was published by Pomegranate Press and the Library of Congress in 2004. A collection of Vice President Cheney cartoons, ‘Dick’, was self-published by Telnaes and Sara Thaves in 2006.”