Many years ago Guillermo del Toro told me he disapproved of Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata because it was an inauthentic, American-ized take on Mexican history, and that the life of Emiliano Zapata could and should be captured by a Mexican filmmaker or at least someone with a closer perspective than a New York Greek-American like Kazan. Agreed, sympathized with, no dispute. I’d like to see that Mexican-made version some day. But the look on Marlon Brando‘s face at the very end of this scene, a look of not just impudence but balls and confidence, is about as good as non-verbal acting gets. Moments like this are why I swear by Kazan’s film, why I’ve watched it over and over, why I own the Bluray.

For whatever reason the TCM embed code isn’t working so I’ve posted a screen grab. Watch the clip via this URL.

On 7.30 Mammoth Lakes resident Rodney Ginn posted a video of a momma bear and a cub invading his home. Esquire‘s Matt Miller posted a riff about it this morning, but he didn’t mention the sound that comes out of Ginn — a fluttery, falsetto shriek — when he sees the bears coming up the stairs. Listen to him…”whoaaaaa…whoo-whoo!” It reminds me of the sound that Harold Gordon makes in Viva Zapata when his character, Francisco Indalecio Madero, is about to be shot by the military.

Harold Gordon’s screaming realization that he’s about to be shot in Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata.

Writing yesterday about that 33 year-old Japanese Spielberg documentary led me to investigate the horrific helicopter accident that came to define Twilight Zone: The Movie, which Spielberg produced, and to some extent cast a shadow over the life/career of John Landis. The footage is old news but I hadn’t really watched it until yesterday. It happened on 7.23.82 at an Indian Dunes location in what is now Santa Clarita, during a late-night filming of a Vietnam nightmare sequence. A helicopter lost its tail rotor due to a stronger-than-expected VFX detonation and it suddenly crashed, killing poor Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, in a millisecond. I’d never read until yesterday that Spielberg ended his relationship with Landis after the incident. The rap against Landis was that he was incautious, but there’s always been a fine line between reckless disregard and capturing that extra element of super-charged realism. It was an accident, yes, but attitudes about safety certainly weren’t paramount. This was the worst on-set accident until the Midnight Rider train-track incident of 2014.

Yesterday a conservative-minded ex-girlfriend suggested that I read Kyle Smith‘s N.Y. Post review of J.D. Vance‘s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” The review (which also includes interview quotes) is titled “Why ‘White Trash’ Americans Are Flocking to Donald Trump.”

Vance is a successful blue-state guy (a “principal” at a Silicon Valley investment firm, lives in San Francisco with wife and family) but he comes from a hillbilly rustbelt town in Ohio, and apparently knows whereof he speaks about downmarket lifestyles and despairing Appalachian culture. A key passage from Smith’s review:

“When Vance returns home these days, he sees yard after yard festooned with Trump signs. Trump’s attacks on the media and political correctness make Vance’s people stand up and cheer. From the Democrats, they draw the same sense of condescension that struck Vance when, at Yale, another student said she couldn’t believe he was in the Marines because he was a nice guy.

“Trump’s me-against-everybody combativeness, his refusal to back down, his vows to disrupt Washington deal-making are giving the hillbilly class a feeling they haven’t had in decades, [which is] that they’ve got a friend at the top.”

This morning I happened upon a short Fandor video in honor of Ida Lupino. First known as a sullen firecracker actress during the ’30s and ’40s (my strongest recollection is her husband-killing femme fatale in Raoul Walsh‘s They Drive By Night), Lupino was the first name-brand woman to make it as a Hollywood feature and TV director (late 40s to mid ’60s). And she made her features as a hip-pocket, self-funding director-producer with an indie attitude — she was John Cassevetes before Cassavetes came along.

Lupino once remarked that during her acting heyday she was “the poor man’s Bette Davis” but when she become a director she regarded herself as “the poor man’s Don Siegel.”

I’d like to post the Fandor video here but the embed code has been hidden — thanks, guys! Here instead is a restored version of Lupino’s creepy noir — The Hitchhiker (’53). Kino issued a remastered Bluray version in ’13 — I just bought a copy.

James Schamus‘s Indignation opened in four theaters this weekend. It earned $89,072 for an average of $22,268 per situation. In my 7.26 review I wrote that it’s worth seeing for a 16-minute argument/debate scene between Logan Lerman (as a Newark-born freshman at an Ohio college) and Tracey Letts (as the college dean). Here’s a Village Voice piece about the writing and filming of this scene. I called Indignation a “respectable, adult-friendly, nicely refined period drama (i.e., early ’50s) about values, academia, obstinacy, surprisingly good sex, Jews (in particular a tough Jewish mom) and — this is key — brutally cruel fates.” I explained that “the ending alienated me to no end.” Did anyone happen to catch it? If so, any thoughts about the third-act windup and the fates that envelop Lerman’s Marcus Messner and Sarah Gadon‘s Olivia Hutton?

Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Michael Fassbender, Aaron Paul, Jon Voight…nobody ranks higher on Hollywood Elsewhere’s shitlist that Zak Galifianakis. Going back to the first Hangover flick and with the exception of his good work in Birdman, I’ve consistently loathed and despised ZG’s man-diaper performances for too long a period. He’s played the same bearded, bipolar low-life in film after film. Which is why I’m grimacing at the thought of watching Jared Hess‘s Masterminds (Relativity,9.30). It obviously has a lively, top-drawer ensemble cast (Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, Ken Marino, Jason Sudeikis, Kate McKinnon), and, yes, is based on a true story. But comedies about rural idiots are never, ever funny. Masterminds was originally slated to open on 8.19.15, but it got sucked into the vortex of Relativity’s financial implosion.

I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere is as much of a sworn enemy of Park Chan Wook as I was of post-Snake Eyes Brian De Palma. I was respectful of Oldboy but then along came Stoker and that was it. I got off the boat. Last May’s Cannes viewing of The Handmaiden (Amazon, 10.14) wasn’t exactly torturous, but I knew going in it would a difficult sit, and it was that. I must have looked at my watch ten times.

Back in ’07 The Bourne Ultimatum‘s earned a first-weekend tally of $69 million. But apply the inflation calculator and that $69 million becomes a bit more than $80 million in 2016 dollars. The just-opened Jason Bourne brought in $60 million this weekend, which represents a 25% dip. The bottom line is that on top of quality issues, Ultimatum still rules by a significant box-office margin.

Everyone agreed that Ultimatum was a bull’s-eye thrill ride, and so it was no surprise that it wound up taking in $227.5 million domestic or a multiple of just over three. The word on Jason Bourne, by contrast, is that it’s reasonably good (certainly in terms of the Athens chase sequence) and no one’s idea of a burn, but not exactly an experience that will blow your socks off. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you think Jason Bourne is going to achieve the same multiple as The Bourne Ultimatum. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that.

If Jason Bourne manages a standard three-multiple it will obviously end up in the domestic vicinity of $180 million, give or take. Not bad but not exactly legendary. Then again Jason Bourne‘s $60 million debut is $22 million more than the $38 million earned four years ago by Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy. And the newbie did earn $50.1 million overseas, which Variety is calling the “biggest overseas debut in the history of the action franchise.”

Khizr Khan, the father of Cpt. Humayun Khan, a slain Muslim American combatant, again trashed Donald Trump and his intemperance and seeming anti-Muslim disdain. “He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country,” Khan said. “The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief — that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul.”

A Japanese documentary team visited Steven Spielberg in the early fall of 1982, around the time he was shooting his “Kick The Can” segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie, which opened in the summer of ’83. This was absolute peak-era Spielberg, and he was only 35. Raiders of the Lost Ark was recent history, having opened 15 or 16 months earlier, and E.T. and Poltergeist had rocked the industry only three or four months before this moment. People thought Spielberg had magic blood back then. Even I thought so at the time. It would never get any better for the guy.

But those sunglasses! If Michelangelo Antonioni had happened along, he would have taken Spielberg aside and told him to throw them in the wastebasket. But that’s Spielberg for you — he’s always been kind of a dork from Arizona.

I nearly did a Sherry Netherland hotel interview with Spielberg in the middle of the E.T. hoohah, but the arrangements were being handled by Peggy Siegel, who at the time was a contentious figure in my journalistic life, and for some insect-antennae reason I was fearful that my time slot was being nudged aside. (At the time I was finishing up an Us magazine cover story about Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore.) So I called the hotel suite where it was supposed to happen and lo and behold, Spielberg answered. I should have just left a please-call message and said thanks, but I explained that I was slotted to speak with him and was wondering about the schedule, etc.

Siegel hit the roof (“How dare you violate protocol by talking to talent without my permission!”) and that was the end of that. She was right — I should have played by the rules.

A friend and I took a longish walk through Bel Air early last evening. The Bel Air Hotel on Stone Canyon (portions of which are getting a little too Kardashian for my tastes), winding west on Chalon Road, up and down steep hills, up Funchal Road and then south on Bellagio down to Sunset, and then back to Stone Canyon. A quiet, settled vibe.  Most of Bel Air is Neverland.  Immense calm, a sense of the past. I don’t care about the wealth — I care about feelings of serenity, the sound of crickets, the proliferation of nature. Hundreds, thousands of old, well-trimmed trees. Gates, gates and more gates. Ivy-covered brick walls, adobe walls, ivy growing everywhere, the wonderfully calming fragrances, the subtlety of the lighting outside dozens upon dozens of handsome Old Spanish homes. It smells like Tuscany, like the hill country of Vietnam. And there’s very little of the vulgar, over-lighted, nouveau-riche homes you see here and there in Beverly Hills, homes that are mostly owned by clueless types (people of Middle Eastern ancestry are certainly among them), people who will never understand that the homes of wealthy folks with a touch of refinement always exude a submission to history…old-world, low-key, pre-WWII stylings. The only unpleasant aspect was the traffic — people in a hurry, driving 35 or 40 mph around sharp curves, areas where 25 or 30 mph would have been more like it.