Posted twelve years ago, feels like five or six: It’s built into our genes to show obeisance before power. It’s obviously a prevailing tendency in Hollywood circles, but hardly an exclusive one. Every culture, every species does the bow-down.

“I was speaking the other night to this know-it-all guy who goes to a lot of Academy screenings and parties, and we were talking about possible Best Actor nominees. We’d both just seen Ray and knew for sure Jamie Foxx was a shoo-in, but who else?

“Paul Giamatti,” I said. “Who?” he asked. “The lead in Sideways,” I reminded. “He’s amazing, heartbreaking…and the film is masterful.”

“Yeah, he was good,” he replied. Uh-huh…not impressed. He’d seen Sideways and liked it, he said, but he had a certain criticism of something Giamatti did in the film that I’m not going to repeat. It was about something obscure that nobody anywhere has mentioned.

What he really meant, I suspect, was that he didn’t empathize with Giamatti and/or his shclumpy Miles character because he’s balding and chubby and a bit of a loser, and the guy wasn’t feeling the tribal urge to celebrate the splendor of Giamatti’s craft. Because for him, superb performances in and of themselves lack a certain primal current.

Then he started in about Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator. He’d seen the upcoming Martin Scorsese film (opening 12.17) and didn’t want to tell me much, but he liked Dicaprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes…mostly. But he had a couple of beefs. One was that Leo doesn’t look much like Hughes, and the other is that he looks too young.

“He’s 29 now,” I reminded.

“He looks like a kid.”

“But does he get Hughes?” I asked. “You know, does he channel him?”

Michael Moore in Trumpland “doesn’t shock or enrage,” writes N.Y. Times critic Neil Genzlinger. “[For] Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny [and] momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it.

“Moore’s [stage] performance in Wilmington, Ohio was filmed just as the 2005 tape that captured Mr. Trump talking about groping women was hitting the news; Mr. Moore’s stage material contains no mention of that controversy, which has since consumed the presidential campaign. So at this juncture his film is, if nothing else, a stark contrast to all that has transpired in the last couple of weeks. It’s surprising to hear someone extolling a candidate’s virtues rather than just harping on what’s wrong with the opponent — it’s surprising to hear, in other words, why we should elect someone rather than why we shouldn’t.”

High-profile Casey Affleck profiles are starting to pop up. They’re all saying his Manchester by the Sea performance (i.e., the sullen, broken-hearted Lee Chandler) is the crowning achievement of his career. 19 out of of 22 Gold Derby “experts” (myself among them) now have Affleck as the most likely Oscar champ in the Best Actor category. I’ve posted this a couple of times before, but ten minutes after Manchester By The Sea finished playing at Park City’s Eccles theatre on 1.23.16 I said Affleck’s performance was “locked” for a nomination. I knew what I’d seen and felt.

The only thing could get in the way is…well, Casey isn’t all that great at lightweight banter and fooling around and being glib on talk shows. It’s just who he is. He’s quiet but a good guy. That Stephen Colbert contretemps was hilarious.

Posted on 1.23.16: “Affleck has delivered the finest, most affecting performance of his life, and in part because he’s lucked into one of the best written lonely-sad-guy roles in years, and because the part, that of Lee Chandler, a Boston janitor and handyman struggling with a horrific mistake that has wounded him for life, taps into that slightly downcast melancholy thing that Affleck has always carried around. It’s like when Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird -— it’s one of those legendary perfect fits.”

Early last evening I attended a London hotel gathering for Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (Focus Features, 11.4), and right off the top had an easy chat with costars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. I’ve been snippy about some of Edgerton’s work in the past (though not his performances in Animal Kingdom or his 2009 BAM performance as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar), but after five minutes of party chatter that whole attitude melted away. If you like somebody, you can’t help it. I’m still no fan of The Gift (which Edgerton directed and costarred in) but he’s definitely off the HE shit list. That phase is over.

I couldn’t get a decent shot of Joel and Ruth, but I was at least able to manipulate this one, taken without flash, into looking semi-decent with the help of PicMonkey (i.e., Adobe Photoshop for dumbshits like myself).

After seeing Loving in Cannes last May I immediately predicted some Best Actress heat for Negga’s quiet, sad-soulful performance, and I wasn’t wrong. Right now she’s neck and neck with La La Land‘s Emma Stone, Jackie‘s Natalie Portman, 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening, Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert and Viola Davis‘s not-yet-seen performance in Fences.

Negga was wearing some killer Rodarte slacks with safety pins up and down the left-leg seam. I told her that last weekend Kristen Stewart was wearing a Rodarte suit with the same safety-pin signature at the Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk premiere.

Ruth Negga’s Rodarte safety-pin slacks, worn to last night’s Loving party.

One of the most frightening wake-ups of my life happened during a cross-country road trip. Three of us in a large Oldsmobile of some kind. We were on a two-lane blacktop somewhere in western Oklahoma, and I’d been sleeping scrunched-up in the back seat. Maybe 6 or 7 am. Somewhere in the recesses of my dawning consciousness I heard the angry chant of 15 gorillas — “Ooo-kachaka! Ooga-ooga-ooo-kachaka! Ooga-ooga-ooo-kachaka!” — getting louder and louder. I was muttering to myself “fuck is that?” and then suddenly a switch was thrown and I felt terrified. Gorillas! I sat up and realized a second later where I was and what I was hearing — Blue Swede’s “Hooked On A Feeling.” I’ve never forgotten that moment, and I never will.

It felt odd — curious — that in the space of 24 hours Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) was injected into my head twice — first on HBO, and then again at the Grove.

Last Sunday night a passage from Alice was heard in episode #3 of Westworld. Jeffrey Wright asked Evan Rachel Wood to read an observation of Alice’s, one that not only hinted at a certain awakening but echoed what Wood’s “host” character, Dolores Abernathy, is starting to experience.

Author Charles Dodgson, whose pen name was Lewis Carroll.

And then Carroll reappeared the following night (Monday) when I paid to see Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant. Cynthia Addai-Robinson‘s Treasury Dept. analyst is exploring Ben Affleck‘s autism/Asperger’s affliction online, and she spends a half-minute looking into Carroll’s alleged experience with a similar condition.

It was enough to make me want to see The Secret Side of Lewis Carroll, a BBC2 documentary that aired last year and which asserted that while Carroll may have fit the profile of a gentle, well-behaved pedophile, he didn’t actually descend into that pit.

The one and only William Tell overture trailer for Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (’71), which popped in the late summer or early fall of that year, was a landmark achievement in movie advertising. Nobody had ever seen anyone like it before. Hugh Atkin‘s Trumpwork Orange, which popped today, is a completely decent tribute piece. Kubrick’s trailer is after the jump.

Watch this scene from Ingmar Bergman‘s Persona and try to imagine Natalie Portman delivering Bibi Andersson‘s monologue with, say, Jennifer Lawrence reclining and listening a la Liv Ullman. Doesn’t work, does it? That’s because this kind of frank eroticism has all but disappeared from mainstream cinema. This landmark Bergman film didn’t open in the U.S. until March 1967, but the “promotional premiere” (whatever that was) happened in Stockholm exactly 50 years ago today. You can’t beat that black-and-white Sven Nykvist cinematography. It may be that my all-time favorite Bergman flick is The Silence (’63).

How long have I been explaining that any would-be tentpole flick that includes a looking-down shot of the hero swan-diving off a tall building is automatically and irrevocably shit? And if you add shots of guys flying from building to building a la Crouching Tiger and/or jumping off a two-story building onto the street below the movie has dug itself into an even deeper hole. Justin Kurzel, director of Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21), went there anyway. Because…you tell me. Because he’s an animal? Add Michael Fassbender to the mix and you’re talking serious toxicity. Sidenote: Poor Jeremy Irons has been doing paycheck work since the mid ’90s. His first shameless-prostitute gig was playing the creepy villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance (’95). His great big-screen run lasted about 12 years — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.

I’m totally down with the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road monochrome version (Warner Home Video, 12.6) but I’d also buy a black-and-white Bluray version of The Road Warrior (’82) in a New York minute. Nor would I mind attending a screening of the black-and-white Fury Road in a decent-sized theatre, just to get the full impact. Update: It’s playing at Cinefamily on Tuesday, November 1st. I take it Warner Home Video will be releasing a black-and-white only version plus a Bluray with both the color and b & w versions together…right? Or am I confusing the Australian version with the domestic?

Last night Michael Moore announced a Tuesday, 10.18 debut of a secret Donald Trump documentary, Michael Moore in Trumpland, at Manhattan’s IFC Center. The torrent that has spewed out of Trump (particularly since he shifted into full-meltdown mode following the Access Hollywood pussy tape and all the sexual-assault accusations) doesn’t need a Moore spin, but I’d love to share in the revelry all the same. Remember that Moore was voicing serious concern about a Trump victory as recently as…what, last July? Variety is describing it as “a film version of [Moore’s] one-man show, which he has been performing in Ohio.” Presumably a Los Angeles screening is being arranged as we speak. I’d love to see it between now and Thursday night as I leave for Savannah on Friday morning.

The Guardian reported yesterday that the Swedish Academy has heard nothing but silence from Bob Dylan about whether or not he’ll be in Stockholm on 12.10.16 to accept his Nobel prize in literature. “I am not at all worried,” Academy secretary Sara Danius is quoted saying. “I think he will show up.” What Dylan is saying with his silence: “I do what I do and that’s enough. I don’t believe in awards or taking bows at high falutin’ ceremonies. Is this some kind of rare honor, a tribute of a lifetime? Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day expressing fuck-all indifference is more important to me than graciousness or good manners. I’ll probably show up but maybe I won’t. I don’t owe shit to anyone or anything. I’ve been a weird-prick motherfucker before and I might be again.” Leonard Cohen agrees after a fashion: “To me, [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”