Like lemmings, you and your pallies will pay to see Antoine Fuqua‘s The Magnificent Seven starting tonight. Despite the fact that you know it more or less blows, as indicated by the 63% and 54% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

“When a lazy wank-off flick like The Magnificent Seven comes along and makes you feel drained and nauseous, people like Denzel Washington and feature writer Lewis Beale say ‘hey, relax…it’s just a movie!’ But there’s no relaxing when a film is flagrantly empty except in terms of the photography (Mauro Fiore‘s lensing is first-rate), and has nothing in the way of cleverness or fresh attitude up its sleeve.” — posted on 9.11.16.

“It is written in the Hollywood playbook that the personalities and speaking styles of action-film heroes have to be wry, cocky, self-amused. So completely confident about their badassery that nothing rattles them. No edge, no anxiety. Pretty much every threat is an opportunity for casual dispatch, gun-twirling and deadpan one-liners.” — “The Smug Brothers,” posted on 7.18.16.

For all his character’s hostility, vulgarity and slovenliness, Billy Bob Thornton has great looking hair in Bad Santa 2 (Broad Green, 11.23).  Finely unkempt, exquisitely barbered, uncombed but perfectly styled — it’s the kind of haircut only rich guys can afford. Billy Bob’s hair is the same length and color as Elizabeth Warren‘s, but the style is more uptown. This is what I love about Hollywood films — they keep you in a lulled state of mind by making sure that the actors, regardless of the ethical or moral constitution of the people they’re portraying, always look good in certain ways. On top of which Billy Bob gets to ram it to Christina Hendricks in a back alley.

During last night’s Gold Derby party I spoke to La La Land composer Justin Hurwitz, who’s a longtime friend and collaborator of director Damien Chazelle. Hurwitz also composed the score of Chazelle’s Whiplash (’14) as well as Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (’09), a musical that resembles La La Land in some ways, and which served as a kind of early training exercise. I enjoyed the fact that La La Land‘s most recognizable songs– “City of Stars” and “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” — are heard a couple of times each, and that this repetition allows the melodies to sink into your system. As you might expect, Hurwitz is a cool, friendly guy. GD’s Tom O’Neil and I were telling him that La La Land is far and away the favorite film of the blogaroonies. The test will come when it opens commercially, of course, and especially when the schlubby-dubbies in the Academy and guilds have a look-see. It’s all well and good for a film to be championed by the blogaroonies and film festival elites, but the 60-and-older crankies and slowboats have to go for it also.

La La Land composer Justin Hurwitz — apologies for the low light but that’s part of the charm of Eveleigh, the Sunset Strip restaurant that hosted last night’s Gold Derby party.

In a just-posted NBC/Wall Street Journal poll more people say Donald Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Hillary Clinton, 41% to 31%. What the respondents are saying, I think, is that however stupid or ignorant Trump’s statements may be, he’s more candid and blunt-spoken. He edits himself less. Hillary is more knowledgable and rational but she always sounds like she’s being less upfront — she edits herself heavily, seems to rarely speak from the gut. Honestly? I agree with this. Trump is more honest in terms of not editing himself and carelessly shooting from the hip, but he’s a monster. In general terms Clinton is leading Trump 43% to 37%.

I hate Zach Galfianakis but he handled things pretty well in this “Between Two Ferns” chat with Hillary Clinton. His impudence burns the fabric. President Obama’s chat was wittier, but the hostility levels are better with Hillary. She’s a good sport (“I’m really sorry I agreed to do this.”) Doing this was an okay move.

HE respects Kathy Miller, the now-removed chair for Donald Trump‘s Mahoning County campaign, for brazenly laying her ignorant beliefs on the line — no ifs, ands or buts. In so doing she reminded those who haven’t been paying attention where most Trump voters are coming from in terms of racial/domestic matters.

The Trump campaign has gotten her to resign, but not before she said (a) there was “no racism” before President Obama’s administration, (b) Black Lives Matter is “a stupid waste of time”, (c) lower voter turnout among African Americans could be related to “the way they’re raised”, and (d) “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault…you’ve had the same schools everybody else went to, benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have…you had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it [so] it’s not our fault, certainly.”

Miller’s remarks were captured on video in a 9.22 Guardian piece by Paul lewis and Silkverstone.

Until I saw Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn‘s Amanda Knox (Netflix, 9.30) yesterday afternoon, I wasn’t fully convinced that the 29 year-old Knox was completely innocent of the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox had been sharing a small cottage with Kercher in Perugia, Italy, while studying as an exchange student. No hard evidence pointed to her guilt, but right after the murder Knox was fingered by Perugia police as a suspect, and soon after she began to be portrayed by tabloid journalists as some kind of deranged sex demon mixed with Lucretia McEvil, and we all know what women of her sort are capable of.

Ludicrous as this sounds, this is the impression I’d been fed but was too lazy to look into. I knew Knox had been convicted and exonerated twice by Italian courts (the second and final acquittal was rendered on 3.27.15 by the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome) but the coverage of her case had been so tainted with innuendo that there was (and still is in some quarters, I suppose) a suspicion that she’d somehow evaded justice. As recently as two years ago a mostly panned Michael Winterbottom film called Face Of An Angel toyed with the idea that an Amanda Knox-like femme fatale (played by Carla Delevigne) might not have been as pure as the driven snow.

Even if she hadn’t murdered Kercher Knox was still bad, the media myth went, because she’d fucked too many guys.

This Hidden Figures trailer is more cerebral and less lighthearted that the one that popped on 8.15, and therefore reflects the product reel that was shown during the Toronto Film Festival on 9.10. Less about chuckles, family and romance and more about science and discrimination and how truly gifted these women were. Wikipedia posted the limited 12.25.16 release weeks ago, but 20th Century Fox is still refusing to officially acknowledge this. The Christmas Day debut will of course allow for awards attention. Who will land the acting noms — Taraji P. Henson or Janelle Monáe, and in what category?

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. In Charley Varrick, John Vernon‘s Maynard Boyle is a mob-connected banker who is enormously relieved when Walter Matthau tells him he wants to return $750K that was unintentionally stolen during a Las Cruces bank robbery. After he hangs up, Vernon makes a gesture with his left hand that says “sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” It’s the most elegant piece of acting that Vernon ever performed, and yet when I mentioned this to Vernon on the set of Hail To The Chief in the spring of ’85 he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He all but ignored me, and I was probably the only guy on the planet who’d ever recognized, much less said to him, that his Charley Varrick hand gesture (it happens at exactly the 2:00 mark) was some kind of beautiful.

Hollywood Elsewhere has just contributed $100 to a Vidiots Indiegogo campaign to raise $65K. They need to move things into the 21st Century or words to that effect. Vidiots is basically a place to rent VHS films that haven’t made it to Bluray or streaming. I haven’t owned a VCR player for 15 years and I’m still vaguely irked at Vidiots for telling me I owed them $125 after I returned a lost-and-then-found VHS of The Wizard of Oz back in ’90. The total value of the VHS was maybe $75 — I refused to pay anything more than that. The Vidiots clerk insisted on the higher figure so I told him forget it and refused to pay them anything. I’ve contributed $100 because for all their obstinacy, Vidiots is a store with heart and spirit, and because its existence enhances the cultural character of Santa Monica.