In the view of Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh (Arrow, 1.13 in LA, 1.209 in NY) is some kind of ultra-grotesque ode to cruelty and perversion in the vein of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom. He describes Amat Escalante‘s Heli, which I described three and a half years ago as a fairly gruesome experience (“a starkly drawn, no-frills, deeply ugly Mexican art film about the ravaging of Mexican society by drug traffickers and how poor people always take it in the neck”), as a relatively palatable thing compared to We Are The Flesh. Minter, says Ehrlich, “takes the defining tropes of his country’s contemporary filmmaking, liberates them from the burden of narrative logic, and stretches them across the screen like Hannibal Lecter hanging a victim by the flaps of his skin.” No thanks.

“CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using BuzzFeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations. We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week. We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.” — CNN statement about yesterday’s reporting about an unsubstantiated dossier that included salacious allegations about Trump’s behavior in Russia during a visit in 2013 (i.e., “Goldwater Republican”).

Speaking as a longtime admirer of refined, upscale horror cinema (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, The Invitation), the idea of four women having directed an omnibus horror film sounds and looks intriguing. Because the instincts of females in this realm, I believe, are likely to be less coarse and exploitive than your garden-variety horror directed by guys. The helmers and their shorts are Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”), Annie Clark (“The Birthday Party”), Roxanne Benjamin (“Southbound”) and Jovanka Vuckovic (“The Captured Bird”). Sofia Carillo is also listed as a kind of animator, coordinator or showrunner of some kind. XX will open in select theaters and on VOD on 2.17.

Donald Trump news conference comment on last night’s unsubstantiated Moscow golden showers report: “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen. It was gotten by opponents of ours. It was a group of opponents who got together…sick people, and they put that crap together. I’m also very much a germaphobe by the way.”

1.10, 6:34 pm: I really wish that the unverified secret dossier that was passed along last week to President Obama and President-Elect Trump by American intelligence agencies and which contained “compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump,” according to a N.Y. Times story, could be satisfactorily vetted. But apparently that’s not in the cards. I’m very, very sorry about that.

It nonetheless feels awfully good to be one of thousands (tens of thousands?) of outlets currently passing along the portion of the dossier that says that during a trip to Moscow Trump ordered sex workers to perform a “golden showers” show in his presence — i.e., a term that means being pissed on or watching girls piss directly in front of you. The scenario in question appears to allude to the latter but you never know.

Excerpt: “Trump‘s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (who he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him,” the report read. “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

If it weren’t for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood Elsewhere would be flying east on the day of Orange Orangutan’s inauguration to take part in the Women’s March on Washington (Saturday, 1.21). The fallback is a Sundance Women’s March that Chelsea Handler is beating the drum for. The Facebook page makes it clear that dudes are totally welcome so I’ll be there with bells on. Marchers will congregate behind the Wasatch Brew Pub (220 Main St. Park City) at 9 am and march down Main. A couple of thousand people may show up — possibly more. The event is expected to end by 11 am.

Suggestion to organizers: If the march is confined just to downtown Park City, it’ll be over within 15 or 20 minutes. That’s all it takes to walk from the top of Main to the bottom. It would be cooler and more of a “thing” if the march hangs a left on 9th Street and just keeps going down Park Avenue, past the Park City Library and all the way to the Doubletree (formerly the Yarrow) parking lot. Question: What’s the anti-Trump chant or slogan? Another suggestion: Find some drummers, make some banners and placards. Aural/visual impact counts.

“But maybe they aren’t politicians any longer. They have become instead pantomine villains whose real job is to make us angry. And when we are angry, we click more. And clicks feed the ever-growing power and wealth of the corporations that run social media. We think we are expressing ourselves, but really we are just components in their system. At the moment, that system absorbs all opposition, Which is why nothing ever changes.” — from Adam Curtis‘s Hypernormalization, a 2016 BBC documentary that popped on 10.16.16 16 on the BBC iPlayer. Curtis’s basic thesis (per Wiki page) is that “since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex ‘real world’ and built a simple ‘fake world’ that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.”

In other words, we’re living in a much more Orwellian big-brother realm than most of us realize.

Svetlana Cvetko, DanceCameraWest exec director Tonia Barber and I attended a UTA screening of Hidden Figures last night. Ted Melfi‘s film was introduced by Melissa McCarthy. After it ended costars Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer did a q & a with director-writer Melfi, and then everyone chit-chatted at a nearby reception. The big news was that last weekend Figures not only had a bountiful reception ($25 million and change) and managed to beat Rogue One for the #1 slot by $750K.

Sidenote #1: Besides being excellent as the big NASA honcho in Hidden Figures, Costner is tall. He was wearing cowboy boots but he has me by a good inch, and I’m just under 6′ 1″. Sidenote #2: Before driving back to his Carpinteria home, Costner mentioned his band, Modern West, and their 2012 album, “Famous For Killing Each Other: Music From and Inspired by Hatfields & McCoys.”

Hidden Figures costars Octavia Spencer, Kevin Costner following last night’s UTA screening.

When I read this morning that the Producers Guild of America voters had nominated Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight for their Daryl F. Zanuck award (i.e., the equivalent of a Best Picture prize)…well, I nearly fell over in my chair. It’s a good thing I have a few percocets left because I needed something to calm myself down. I was literally vibrating.

Seriously, no one is very interested. You have to report on the various guild noms because you have to, but that doesn’t mean they’re of any special interest.

The only PGA-nominated film worth mentioning is a film not worth mentioning — i.e, the reprehensible Deadpool, which I called “a glib, porno-violent Daffy Duck cartoon” while I reviewed it a little more than eleven months ago. I don’t want to think about why this thing was nominated, not just by the PGA but also the WGA guys.

If the ghost of Daryl F. Zanuck was capable of processing the PGA’s bizarre admiration for this wretched joke of a film, his shrieks would be heard among the clouds. He would curse and punch a refrigerator door and then return to earth in order to confront the membership at the next meeting. “You’re nominating a piece of shit like Deadpool? I know it can’t win but this award has my name on it, dammit!”

Do some people-watching inside any cafe or restaurant or semi-exclusive party and you’ll notice that healthy couples (i.e., unions that aren’t based on the guy being rich and the woman being a gold-digger) always seem to be similarly attractive. If a woman is a 7.5 or an 8 she’ll tend to be with a guy who’s a 7.5 or an 8. Birds of a feather, etc. And so I always react negatively when this rule of thumb is ignored by hip filmmakers because of…you tell me, p.c. guidelines or whatever. Because this is not how it is out there.

Case in point: John Ridley‘s Guerilla, a six-part Showtime miniseries set in ’70s London. Because leading costar Freida Pinto is totally choice — anyone’s idea of an 8.5 if not a 9 — there’s no way I’m buying Babou Ceesay as her boyfriend. Too chubby, not good-looking enough, nope. Pinto and Ceesay are roughly equivalent to Grace Kelly and George Gobel being paired off in a 1954 romance of some kind. Or Faye Dunaway and Allen Garfield in a ’70s flick.

This 42 year-old Mike Douglas Show clip is worn and tattered, but it’s the shit. Really. Because it allows you to meditate upon the great Muhammad Ali and his refusal to embrace liberal inclusiveness as it was known in 1974, and his obstinate, unyielding insistence that the only thing he cared about was the living conditions of black people and that other tribes need to fend for themselves. (What would the young Ali be saying now about Donald Trump?) Sly Stone was obviously stoned or drunk. Congressman Wayne Hays, who would resign two years later over the Elizabeth Ray sex scandal, offered many of the positive sentiments that mainstream neoliberals were saying back then. Theodore Bikel was his usual moderate, sensible self. Here’s the whole kit and kaboodle.

In nominating Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Donald Trump was saying “this is another expression, people, of where I’m coming from and what my election was all about — the resurgence of whiteness and white cultural dominance, and a modest but effective suppression of the multiculturals. We’ll try to put a happy face on it, but these folks are not going run the show as much, trust me. The Obama years are over, and we’re not gonna take any shit.”

Do I, Jeffrey Wells, have the courage and conviction to rant during a confirmation hearing and get myself tossed out and maybe arrested? If past behaviors are any indication (and they are), the answer is “uhhm…well, not really.” I’ve always run alongside the action, staying close but mainly as a cautious observer, like Robert Redford would have behaved in a ’70s movie about street protests. I’ve never been thrown out of anything, never been punched or billy-clubbed by a cop. I take potshots from the side.