Right away I thought “this is brilliant…Tina Fey playing the departed Carrie Fisher as a Priness Leia (or Obi Wan Kenobi)-like hologram, offering SNL hosting advice to Felicity Jones.” Actually not, but it could’ve been that. It was the only bit in last night’s show that made me sit up, at least as far as the potential concept was concerned.

It’s not that I’m disinclined to write at length about Raoul Pecks’ I Am Not Your Negro (Magnolia, 2.3), which renders the impassioned life and times of the great James Baldwin with clarity and precision. It’s that I can’t think of anything to say except (a) “this is a sterling, well-edited, highly intelligent film that ought to be seen and reflected upon by everyone” and (b) “yup, that was Baldwin, all right…a lion and a prophet who lived a robust life.”

The only book of Baldwin’s that I actually sat down and read was “The Fire Next Time” (’63). It dug right down. Straight, astute, honest observations about the undercurrent of racial relations in the Kennedy era along with intimations of the militancy that would begin to manifest in the mid ’60s. But most of my impressions of Baldwin came from talk show appearances and magazine articles. It’s all in the doc, all in his words. He was a seriously tough hombre who didn’t mince words.

The basic story arc of Baldwin’s life — coming to terms with his apartness, artistic aspirations and anger at U.S. racism in the late ’30s and ’40s, moving to France (Paris and then St. Paul de Vence) in ’48, returning to the U.S. in ’57 to grapple full-on with the beast, rising to full cultural prominence in the ’60s and early ’70s, becoming a leading voice of resistance in a tumultuous time, harnessing his anger and fusing it with social criticism, poetry, demonstrating in marches, etc. — just gets you deep down.

The man had moxie and a bullwhip tongue. A gay man who retreated only to find his voice in Europe and then return home when there was nothing else to do, a man who came back to his native land with guns blazing…speaking truth to power.

All my life I’ve been averse to jelly-bean, sorbet-like colors, particularly when it comes to apparel. Colors that are so odious, so plastic, so staunchly opposed to the natural order and hue of things. Colors that insist on a certain obnoxiousness. You can’t order people to develop a sense of taste about stuff. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and either you get this at the end of the day or you don’t. Some people, clearly, are incapable of this — incapable of stepping back, examining their wardrobe and shoe closet and saying, “Holy shit…what am I doing?” Eyesore colors are conventional permutations in certain corners of Latino culture…intense teal, phosphorescent pinks….I get that. But I was still a little stunned this morning when I saw the below photo-plus-caption from Los Angeles broadcaster Elizabeth Espinosa.

With one of the worst Arturo Ui-like demagogues in the history of this planet moving into the White House in five days and the general terms of life for all but the well-heeled about to be profoundly degraded and perhaps even poisoned (God help us)…with the realization finally hitting most of us that this happened because too many left-of-center humanist types crawled so far into their own p.c. anal cavities that they told themselves that a palpable populist movement that was tapped into simultaneously by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders didn’t matter all that much, and that a fundamentally dislikable candidate with a checkered history, a braying voice, the vibe of an ex-wife and the manner of a testy substitute teacher could win the votes of Middle Americans…with all of that horror descending upon us like the furies, it hit me this morning that Oliver Stone‘s inches speech is something to meditate upon. Substitute the football terminology for the political-cultural stuff, and it all sounds exactly right.

“We can stay here and get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back, into the light…we can climb out of hell, one inch at a time.”

Love comes and goes, but being pretty good at something and enjoying what you do and making decent coin in the bargain is, I feel, almost damn near everything. Or close enough. The right gig fills you up and makes your cup runneth over every day. Breathless.

I honestly haven’t had a serious encounter with any kind of Frank Sinatra-styled gloom and loneliness since…the early ’90s? I was in a black pit after my divorce in ’91, mainly because the kids had moved up north and I had to get used to seeing them only on visits and whatnot. But I gradually sucked it in, and I began to light some candles and it all began to work out for the most part.

Yeah, I feel little spasms of regret these days from time to time, but they don’t last long enough to amount to anything. The only thing that really puts a cloud over my life is when something ugly happens on Twitter. Sinatra would’ve been great on Twitter. He would’ve bitchslapped those SJWs within an inch of their lives. He would’ve been brutal.

It took me four viewings to finally fall big-time for Justin Hurwitz‘s La La Land score. I liked it from the get-go but the love didn’t happen until the other night at the IMAX screening, which led me to play the soundtrack CD this afternoon. Go figure. Maybe I didn’t tumble at first because of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone‘s not-quite-there singing. I only know that it’s finally in my bloodstream. I’m especially in love with the passage between 2:12 and 2:48. The music on its own probably isn’t enough, but when you blend it all together…

Back in the old days movies (dramas, comedies, thrillers) used to occasionally include semi-nude scenes. Which were exploitive, of course, but also half-cool in their own way. Not nude scenes, which we still have from time to time, but semi-nude scenes, which were arguably hotter than franker depictions of whatever because of the inherent clash of values and sensibilities (commercially lewd intentions vs. prudish social instincts) behind them. The brand-name actresses who performed in these dopey scenes would always half-cover themselves with a bedsheet or a towel, not because such cover-ups even began to reflect actual human behavior but because of clauses in contracts that sought to limit exposure. It was this climate of disputing and negotiating and pleading and adamant refusals that led to these mostly ridiculous moments, like this one from Go Naked In The World. Yes, a mainstream film was actually called that.

Why would Christopher Steele, a respected investigator and former MI6 agent, a guy with a family and a mortgage and bills to pay, work for weeks without salary? Probably because he was convinced that the project he’d been working on (and which not enough people had paid sufficient attention to) was bigger than himself, bigger than just a job.

This Independent article by Kim Sengupta adds that “it is believed that a colleague of Mr. Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid.”

Barry Levinson‘s The Wizard of Lies, an HBO flick about despised ponzie-schemer Bernie Madoff, will premiere on HBO in May. Robert De Niro as the #1 motherfucker, Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff, Alessandro Nivola as Mark Madoff + Nathan Darrow, Kristen Connolly, Lily Rabe and Hank Azaria. Madoff now resides in a federal pen in Butner, North Carolina. His projected release date is November 14, 2139, at which point Bernie will be 201 years old.

It’s not a rumor nor subject to debate — Peter Berg‘s Patriots Day (which opened on over 3000 screens this weekend) is a fleet, punchy docudrama that totally kills in the second act and is generally an A-level thing. (The only problem is that “Boston, fuck yeah!” tribute section at the very end.) So why isn’t it playing as well as expected?

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro says that a projected three-day tally of only $14.2 million is “an upset, [especially] considering that many box office analysts thought this movie had a shot at No. 1 with a $20 million-plus four-day” — the Martin Luther King holiday falls on Monday — “juiced by some of the flyover state American Sniper crowd.”

To some extent the $14.2 million argues with Patriots Day‘s A+ CinemaScore, which suggests that good word of mouth is out there and should gradually kick in. D’Allesandro reminds that an A+ grade (which is relatively rare) usually results “in a 4.8 multiple off 3-day openings which means Patriots Day could get close to $60 million.”

I figured that Patriots Day would sell itself. I thought it was better than just a magnet for the hinterland crowd (i.e., beefy, beer-chugging, flannel-shirt-wearing Trump voters) — I thought it would play all over, for everyone — but that $14.2 million suggests that even the primitives weren’t as enthused as they might have been. Why, I wonder?

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allessandro is projecting that Hidden Figures, expected to win the weekend and just shy last night of a $40 million gross, will come in only 14% lower than last weekend’s three-day tally. That’s a phenomenal hold.

A couple of months ago I would predicted that among African-American films Fences would be the humdinger and that Hidden Figures looked like a maybe. I was wrong. Hidden Figures is actually “crushing Fences‘ core audience,” says D’Allesandro, adding that the Denzel Washington flick is “actually set to decline 42% [this weekend] with $3.4 million, for a total cume of $46.6 million.”

What’s the Hidden Figures verdict from HE regulars? The stellar performances aside, my view is that it’s a smart, reality-based confection that aims to please, and does that efficiently. Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasing audiences, but Fences is a heavier, deeper, more high-level thing.

Last night I caught a screening of Bullitt at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. I was fearful when I read it would be shown in 35mm, but the print was fairly pristine. (If a wee bit faded.) And I was especiallly pleased that it was being shown in 1.66:1 — the finest non-Scope aspect ratio, the a.r. of the Godz, HE’s own, etc.

If one of the leading 1.85 fascists had been there with me (Bob Furmanek, say, or Pete Apruzzese), they would’ve sat bolt upright and said “whoa, wait a minute…theatres projected mainstream non-Scope studio films exclusively in 1.85 starting in mid-1953, and Bullitt was released in ’68 or 15 years after the big aspect ratio changeover so what is this?”

Bullitt in 1.66:1 as projected last night at the American Cinematheque Egyptian.

Same scene at 1.78:1 as presented on the Warner Home Video Bluray — the richer Bluray colors are par for the course.

I went to the lobby and asked to speak to the projectionist. The manager declined (there must be some ironclad rule about protecting projectionists from the rabble) so I asked if he’d ask the projectionist himself if Bullitt was indeed being shown at 1.66, and if so, why not the allegedly uniform standard of 1.85? I didn’t say “the 1.85 fascist cause hangs in the balance” but that’s what I was thinking. Nor did I say “Bob Furmanek and Pete Apruzzese are going to be very upset if you come back with the wrong answer.”

The manager returned three minutes later and said the projectionist wasn’t in the booth. So I went up to the balcony and noticed an older, cool-looking guy standing near the booth. “Are you the projectionist?” I whispered. ‘Yeah,” he said. “I think it’s really great that you’re showing this in 1.66,” I said. He said that 1.66 was a suggested format or that it looked best that way or something like that. I wanted to give him a hug. Every hateful emotion I’ve felt over the years while dealing with Furmanek, Apruzzese and the rest of those Home Theatre Forum fascists just flew away and were replaced by a feeling of warmth and comradeship.