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From 8.23 Washington Post story, filed by Katie Mettler and Lindsey Bever: “At a number of political rallies over the past year, a character calling himself ‘Michael the Black Man’ has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, impossible to miss and prompting widespread fascination. Almost always, he plugs his wild website, Gods2.com, across his chest. Variously known as Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel, he’s [a] radical fringe activist from Miami who once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult, and he runs a handful of amateur, unintelligible conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama ‘The Beast’ and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah Winfrey, he says, is the devil. Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders. But Michael the Black Man loves President Trump.”

Last night’s screening was Lysa Heslov‘s Served Like A Girl, which did well review-wise at South by Southwest ’17. Five women veterans who’ve endured serious trauma in the military create a shared sisterhood to help the rising number of stranded homeless women veterans, etc. It’s basically about women persevering, surviving and sticking together through thick and thin. Particularly mothers and daughters. Sad but stirring. Edited, scored with spunk and polish. I felt it. It got me.

Lysa Heslov, director & co-writer of Served Like A Girl, flanked by Catherine Bach (Dukes of Hazzard) and daughter following Monday’s screening at the London West Hollywood.

From Shari Linden’s THR review: “Glamorous gowns are definitely involved, and yes, there’s a talent contest, but the Ms. Veteran America competition is no beauty pageant in the conventional sense. The gutsy women who vie for the title come in all shapes and sizes. They’ve served in Afghanistan and Iraq, some have suffered dire injuries, and they’ve all weathered plenty on the home front as well. The participants profiled in Heslov’s documentary are the epitome of resilience, but they’re also disarmingly honest and funny as hell. In a word, they’re irresistible.

“Focusing on seven women involved in the 2015 competition (the fourth edition of the event), Served Like a Girl takes a while to find its groove. But as it sheds light on these women’s experiences and the larger issue of homelessness among female vets, the film grows deeply engaging. Whatever the perceived or real political and social divisions between military families and the rest of us, this rousing nonfiction feature by Heslov, a producer making her directorial debut, suggests there’s far more common ground than many might suspect.”

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Posted on 1.4.17 by “Ned Glasgow.” This obviously isn’t HE material, but the unseen driver is Robert Carlyle‘s character in Trainspotting, or has at the very least been inspired by him.

All along I’ve been getting an “oh, God, no” feeling from Tulip Fever (Weinstein Co., 9.1) — a conviction that the 17th Century Amsterdam milieu is too far removed from my own, that it has nothing to say to me. The principal symbol of that apartness is the ruff, or that ridiculous ornate collar that men and women wore between the mid 16th and mid 17th Century, and which Christoph Waltz is seen wearing in a couple of scenes from the trailer. I saw Waltz surrounded by that absurd neck wear and I went “nope…can’t do this.” If I’d been director Justin Chadwick, I would have said to my costume designer, “I don’t care how inaccurate this is, but my actors are not wearing those awful ruffs…create something else, anything else. Audiences will take one look at Waltz and they’ll laugh.”

Christoph Waltz’s neck surrounded by a white ruff, a staple of mid-17th Century fashion in the Netherlands.

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$72 for a 50th anniversary remastering of the stereo and mono versions of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request? Not happening. But I’ll never forget how Wes Anderson‘s decision to play the entire track of “2000 Man” during a third-act heist sequence in Bottle Rocket impressed the shit out of me. Does any lyric for any ’60s song deliver the prophetic ring of “I am having an affair with the random computer“? Mick Jagger > Nostradamus.

Yesterday’s Jerry Lewis meditations led to re-reading portions of Nick Tosches‘ “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams“, and eventually to thinking about old-time, mob-influenced Las Vegas and the original Ocean’s 11. And I was reminded how that so-so film has (a) an excellent beginning via that Saul Bass main-title sequence and (b) a soulful lonely-guy finale as the Rat Pack shuffles along the Las Vegas Strip, their loot up in smoke. The rest is just okay. And I began asking which other films qualify in this regard? They start off like a house on fire and conclude in a poignant, just-right way, but mostly they just dribble the ball.

Suburbicon (Paramount, 10,.27) feels Fargo-ish. Middle-class milquetoast (Matt Damon, William H. Macy) up to no good, dodging the authorities when they drop by the office, a clever investigator (Frances McDormand, Oscar Isaac) on his tail, etc. Just as portions of Stanley Kubrick‘s never-filmed Napoleon turned out to be a warm-up for portions of Barry Lyndon, it seems as if elements in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Suburbicon script, written in ’86 but never filmed until George Clooney and Grant Heslov took the reins, were used in Fargo ten years later.

Two changes: Woody Allen‘s recently upgraded Wonder Wheel added to the roster, and a mistake fixed regarding Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour.