Reginald Hudlin‘s Marshall (Open Road, 10.13) is a reasonably engaging, racially-charged courtroom drama in the classic mold, and by that I mean it follows a certain scheme (good-guy underdog vs. tainted establishment) and a certain path (things look shaky and then dispiriting for the good guys before the clouds part and God smiles). You can say “I’ve seen this kind of thing before” but it’s the singer, not the song, and anyone with a fair-minded attitude would have to conclude that Marshall is at least somewhat different, and that Hudlin (who hasn’t directed a feature since ’02’s Serving Sara) has done a better-than-decent job of fusing it all together.

Marshall doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but it’s a moderately okay, good-enough thing. It’s intelligent, efficient, well-shot, not a burn, contains decent performances, etc.

Marshall is about an innocent black defendant charged with raping a white woman, and defended by a heroic, soft-spoken, highly principled attorney, and with the locals 100% convinced, of course, that the black guy did it, but with late-arriving testimony eventually pointing to the defendant…well, not being exactly “innocent” but at the same time not guilty of having initiated contact, much less sexual assault.

Sound familiar? The same kind of rape trial served as the dramatic centerpiece of To Kill A Mockingbird, except here it’s (a) a true story, (b) set in 1940s Bridgeport, Connecticut instead of early 30s rural Alabama, and (c) focuses not on some noble Atticus Finch-like character but young NAACP attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) as the principal defender.

Assisting Marshall (76 years ago as well as in the film) is another real-life figure, Jewish civil attorney Sam Friedman, who was forced to handle the case verbally and procedurally when the presiding judge (James Cromwell) forbade Marshall from speaking during the trial due to his not being a member of the Connecticut bar.

Boseman (Black Panther, 42, Get On Up) plays Marshall like a brilliant, well-mannered hotshot who’s just parachuted in from 2017. A very good-looking, well-dressed black attorney with a low-key, “everything’s cool but don’t fuck with me” attitude like Steve McQueen‘s Lieutenant Bullitt. He talks tough, throws some punches in a bar, drinks water from a “whites only” fountain, winks at the ladies, and says “fuck you” to a fellow attorney in a rare moment of anger.

Given the unenlightened racial attitudes that unfortunately prevailed in the early 40s, you might expect Boseman to sprinkle a little Sidney Poitier into his performance, but nope. He’s well-mannered but blunt-spoken, confident, straight from the shoulder, no pussyfooting around. A cool-cat fantasy figure.

“Right from the beginning, this governor [Ricardo Rossello]…who isn’t even from my party, did not play politics [unlike San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz]…I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and when you look at a real catastrophe like [Hurricane] Katrina, and the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died [from Katrina]….what is your death count now? 16 people? 16 people vs. deaths in the thousands [from Katrina]….everybody here can be really proud.”

Trump translation: “You cost us tons and tons of money and you only had 16 people die? Don’t even talk about your catastrophic deaths in the same breath as Katrina. 16 deaths do not impress me. Hell, no one is impressed. 16 ants stepped on…barely registers on the cosmic scale. Just ask Orson Welles‘ character, Harry Lime, from The Third Man…that scene in the ferris wheel.”

From A.O. Scott’s N.Y. Times review of Blade Runner 2049: “[Warner Bros.] has been unusually insistent in its pleas to critics not to reveal plot points. That’s fair enough, but it’s also evidence of how imaginatively impoverished big-budget movies have become.

“Like any great movie, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (’82) cannot be spoiled. It repays repeated viewing because its mysteries are too deep to be solved and don’t depend on the sequence of events.

“Denis Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.

“As such, Blade Runner 2049 stands in relation to Blade Runner almost exactly as K stands in relation to Deckard before the two meet: as a more docile, less rebellious ‘improvement,’ tweaked and retrofitted to meet consumer demand.

“But now and then — when Ryan Gosling‘s K and Harrison Ford‘s Deckard are knocking around the old gambling palace; when K visits an enigmatic mind-technician played by Mackenzie Davis — you get an inkling that something else might have been possible. Something freer, more romantic, more heroic, less determined by the corporate program.”

There are very few aspects or side-angles that elude Deadline‘s Pete Hammond when it comes to assessing a new film or, if the shoe fits, its award-season potential. At the same time he’s always had a fairly generous, big-of-heart attitude about the movie realm. (As do I on a certain level.) It’s precisely because Hammond is not a neghead Addison DeWitt type that I trust his impressions about Blade Runner 2049 much more than Jordan Hoffman‘s or David Ehrlich‘s.

Hammond observation #1: Blade Runner 2049 has “an overly long and drawn-out running time of 2 hours and 44 minutes that could have used some trimming. The storytelling takes its sweet time and quite frankly can be a bit confusing to see where it is all going, but maybe that’s the point.”

Hammond observation #2: “Even if I was submitted to waterboarding techniques I probably couldn’t reveal the details of this byzantine plot.” Wells interjection: The very mention of waterboarding obviously alludes to movie-watching torture, which was presumedly in Hammond’s mind.

Hammond observation #3: “Suffice to say this deliberately-paced film really comes alive once Harrison Ford comes on board about an hour and a half into it.” Wells interjection: It can be safely presumed that “deliberately paced” means slowly paced, leadenly paced, slightly boring, etc. In short, Blade Runner 2049 is more or less a stiff until Ford arrives.

From another critic friend: “Too much movie for how little story there was. A great looking movie; if I had the slightest interest in virtual reality (which I don’t), that’s a world I would want to walk around in. I assumed that the same climate dysfunction that caused the constant rain in LA in the first film had simply gotten worse so that, this much farther into the future, it alternately rains and snows.”

Sidebar: Hammond mentions that it snows in Blade Runner‘s futuristic Los Angeles. Which is quite the rarity as snow hasn’t fallen here since 1962. A 12.9.16 KCET.org article by Nathan Masters reports that snow once fell on the Los Angeles coastal plain with some regularity — about once per decade. Since official records were first kept in 1877, the downtown Los Angeles weather station observed measurable snowfall three times, in 1882, 1932 and 1949, and news reports recorded snowfall elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin in 1913, 1921, 1922, 1926, 1944, 1957, 1962 — and then never again, for 54 years running.”

A draft I once read of Robert Towne‘s script for The Two Jakes, which took place in in 1948 Los Angeles, ended with a snowfall that actually happened in January ’49. I can’t remember if a snowfall appeared in Jack Nicholson‘s 1990 film version or not.

No offense, but after wading through Hillary Clinton‘s “What Happened” for the last two or three weeks, who wants to see this? Who is their right mind would want to relive that day again? And what’s with the older black guy saying he would be voting for the first time in 30 years? He didn’t vote for Bill Clinton in ’92 or ’96, for Gore or Kerry in ’00 and ’04, or for Obama in ’08 and ’12, but he decided to vote for Hillary in ’16? Brilliant.

1:03 pm update: Tom Petty belongs to the ages…taken at age 66 by a severe heart attack. 1:57 pm update: No, wait…he’s still clinging to life, says TMZ. Various outlets reported earlier today that Petty was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after he was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest (i.e., heart totally stopped). He was taken from his Malibu home and to the UCLA Santa Monica Hospital. One report said that upon realization that Petty had no brain activity, he was taken off life support. NME is reporting that he’s gone. Others have him on life support. For a few moments his Wikipedia page was referring to him in the past tense, but now they’ve got him living again. The poor guy just played the Hollywood Bowl last Monday night. Nope…he’s gone. Wait, not yet. So sad, so sorry.

In the wake of something traumatic or extra-ghastly, like what happened last night in Las Vegas, few things give me a greater feeling of relief and even solace than watching Russian car crashes on YouTube. I rarely laugh out loud at comedies, but I’ll laugh my ass off at the rank stupidity and bone-dumb recklessness in these clips. My mantra while doing so: “I could so avoid these situations, I’m so much smarter than these morons, and way more skillful behind the wheel.” Wonderful therapy, shiatsu massage, peace in the valley.

From “The First White President,” an Atlantic essay written by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

“The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (‘When you’re a star, they let you do it’), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House.

“But that is the point of white supremacy — to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.”

Devastating, horrific and indescribably sad, obviously, but not a surprising or even an unfamiliar domestic spectacle. 58 dead and probably climbing. Orlando, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, San Ysidro — last night’s Las Vegas massacre was the latest chapter (installment?) in an ongoing, slowly-unfolding nightmare brought to all Americans by the NRA, the legislators who’ve blocked any and all attempts to restrict the sale of automatic weapons, by gun freaks, by that whole diseased and reprehensible culture.

Fringe nutters like Stephen Paddock are unfortunately part of our American landscape, but how many of last night’s victims would be okay this morning if Paddock didn’t have an easily purchasable automatic arsenal? If he was restricted to single-shot weapons? Mass carnage is what automatic rifles are fundamentally about, and last night’s tragedy — why mince words? — is essentially on the political right, on conservative gun nuts.

Australia saved itself from this pattern of horror after a mass shooting occured in ’96, and here we are 20 years hence, soaked in gore and grief and probably fated to stay that way because of hinterland macho types and their obsessive, twisted need for their totems.

Nobody needs automatic weapons except for sick fucks who might one day use them.

Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times piece spells it out, but we all know the restrictions by heart — universal background checks, prevent loose cannons from buying weapons of any kind, limit gun purchases to any one person over a certain period, etc.

The following is a re-wording of an HE piece posted on 7.26.15 and 3.7.12. I’m inspired to re-post after last night’s screening of a Lolita DCP at the Aero Theatre, as part of a general tribute to former Kubrick producer James B. Harris.:

Back in the early ’90s, a boxy version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was issued on Criterion CAV laser disc. By this I mean a version that was partly presented in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio with occasional 1.66 croppings from time to time.

Dr. Strangelove was also presented this way (1.37/1.66) on an early Columbia-TriStar Home Video DVD, before the 1.85 fascists muscled their way in and started cleavering everything.

Yes, I’m happy that the current Lolita Bluray is cropped at 1.66, but boy, would I love to get hold of a high-def version of that 1992 Criterion laser disc. You think Kubrick didn’t sign off on the boxy Lolita? Of course he did.

Criterion presumably still has access to the original Lolita elements that they created their laser-disc version from. If they were to somehow wangle rights from Warner Home Video and offer a 4K-scanned version of this long-gone version (i.e., varying 1.37 plus 1.66 aspect ratios), I would buy it in a New York minute, and so would a lot of other physical-media freaks, I’m guessing. Or they could offer a streaming version on Filmstruck. Either way it would definitely sell.

I realize that relatively few people out there believe that “boxy is beautiful,” and that an alternating 1.33 and 1.66 version of Lolita means little or nothing to them, but I never bought this disc and never saw it anywhere, not once. And it’s killing me that today’s general fascist mindset (i.e., almost all non-Scope ’50s and ’60s films must conform to the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of high-def screens) makes it all but certain that this version of Lolita will never be exhibited or offered ever again. Unless Criterion changes its mind and makes the effort. I for one would be enormously grateful.

In the spring of ’18 or roughly 7 months hence, Trevor Paglen‘s Orbital Reflector, a 100 foot-long satellite that will have absolutely no purpose other than to inspire people to look up and watch as it passes overhead, will be launched into orbit. Well, not precisely — a condensed package will be launched, and then it will unfold and inflate into its full diamond-like shape at a height of 350 miles. Orbital Reflector will last in orbit for roughly two months, and then will gradually descend and burn up in the atmosphere.

Be honest — when was the last time you laid outside on your back after 10 pm and just watched the night sky for more than a minute or two? I used to do this from time to time in my druggy days. The cosmic altogether would just sink into your system after a while. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t done this since I stayed in Independence, a little town adjacent to the Sierra Nevada mountains where the air is unpolluted for the most part and the night vistas are always sharp and clear. When was the last time U.S. citizens did this en masse? After Sputnik was launched in 1957? I’ll definitely be watching for Orbital Reflector several times during its 60-day lifespan.