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I had forebodings about Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (Focus Features, 11.4). I was concerned that a dramatization of the legal case surrounding a once-controversial interracial marriage between Mildred and Richard Loving might not amount to anything more than a rote retelling. Well, the film is better than I expected. A warm, measured, adult-level thing. I wasn’t doing handstands in the lobby but I was telling myself “hmmm, okay, not bad.”

It’s less fact-specific than I would have preferred, and there’s the usual emphasis on emotional rapport and interplay and fine, nicely underplayed performances, my favorite being Ruth Negga‘s as Mildred. And at 123 minutes it feels 10 or 15 minutes too long.

If you’re at all familiar with the facts or if you happened to catch Nancy Buirski‘s The Loving Story, a 2012 HBO doc, it’ll be hard to avoid a feeling of being narratively tied down. Alessandra Stanley‘s 2.13.12 review of Buirski’s doc is a good place to start if you’re not up on the case.

The fact that Loving is a compassionate, plain-spoken, better-than-decent film will almost certainly result in award-season acclaim, particularly some Best Actress talk for Ms. Negga’s kindly, sad-eyed wife and mom. I suspect she’s the hottest contender right now for the festival’s Best Actress prize.

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Many Brits have been interviewed about their participation last weekend in Spencer Tunick’s naked blue-skinned photo shoot in the northeastern coastal city of Hull. They all said it was exciting, disarming, liberating, etc. Nothing shameful about our bodies, they should be celebrated, etc. I don’t think there’s anything “shameful” either. None of the participants I was able to inspect in various photographs look like they work out much, but that’s fine. (I guess.) Hundreds of Pillsbury doughboy bods, ample bellies, sloping breasts, sagging asses, guys hung like cashews…all dyed blue and teal. I can’t find one guy — not one! — with a bod like Tom Hiddleston‘s. Not complaining, just observing. The only respectful qualifier is whether these bods should be “celebrated.” Accepted, tolerated, nothing to feel ashamed of…okay. But apart from these people being alive and their systems being disease-free and in reasonable working order, what biological aspects warrant celebration? I’m asking.

Was it really so awful, so devastating, so crippling to the cause that Bernie Sanders waited five weeks to endorse Hillary Clinton? If Sanders had capitulated right after the California primary, his supporters would have seen that as a shameful betrayal. Bernie “hung on”, quixotically, because he and his team wanted progressive Democratic platform concessions that probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d conceded in early June. You know the Clintons.

Does anyone except Sasha Stone seriously believe that Donald Trump might prevail in November? Hillary is naturally and unstoppably self-destructive, agreed, but there are no more threats hanging over her now. No more emails, no more Benghazis…nothing except the unfortunate fact that millions and millions of people don’t like her much.

“Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that,” Sanders said this morning. “She will be the Democratic nominee for president and I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States.

“I have come here today not to talk about the past but to focus on the future. That future will be shaped more by what happens on November 8th in voting booths across our nation than by any other event in the world. I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president. Mainly because Donald Trump must not win. Please. Get real. Oh, right…the yokels out there have a different idea of what that means.

“Am I concerned that Secretary Clinton isn’t Elizabeth Warren? That she’s not really on the Sanders-Warren revolution team? That she’s more of a practical minded center-right Atlanticist than a real lefty? Am I concerned that Susan Sarandon is contemplating driving off the Grand Canyon as we speak? Does the fact that Hillary has been nurturing all of those cozy, amicable relationships with Wall Street billionaires give me a moment of pause? Of course it does. Of course I am.

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There’s some kind of Jason Bourne junket in Las Vegas this weekend, but apparently only for TV/radio types. Even without a sit-down I wanted to attend one of the screenings, which will presumably happen on Friday and Saturday evenings. I wouldn’t have flown but driven there. Vegas in the blazing, boiling heat can be a trip. Maybe crash at the Boulder Dam Hotel. Los Angeles press screenings will begin next week. The film opens on 7.29.

Whatever Peter Berg‘s Deepwater Horizon (Summit, 9.30) is going to be or amount to, this one-sheet is aimed at the Chinese.

Christians have always wanted actors playing Yeshua of Nazareth to be good looking Anglo-Saxon types, a little fashion-modelly, a good jawline, lightly tanned like a surfer, maybe a bit sweaty but always with wavy brown hair. Even Martin Scorsese adhered to this expectation. Was a full-face photographic closeup of a sexy J.C. ever used for a Passion of the Christ one-sheet? If so I can’t find it. Here, in any case, is a closeup of a handsome Argentinian actor (Rodrigo Santoro) with a strong, straight nose and damp, stringy hair and a crown of thorns, captured in a somewhat forlorn mood as he hangs from a cross on Golgotha. Which is an effective way to sell Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur (Paramount, 8.19) — a “Tale of the Christ’ from the stocky, bearded director of Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

It took John Heilemann and Mark Helperin a little more than a year to write and publish “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime” in January 2009. By March 2012 the dramatic narrative version, Jay Roach‘s Game Change, debuted on HBO. It is therefore reasonable to presume that Heilemann & Halperin’s book about the 2016 election will be out by late ’17 or early ’18, and that an HBO movie about battle between Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will be airing by late ’19 or early ’20. There are many actors who could play all three, but on this morning’s Today show Bryan Cranston kick-started a conversation about his playing Trump. Cranston to Carson Daly: “He’s huge…this Shakespearean character…a serio-comic tragic character…who wouldn’t want to take a bite of that?” Wells to Cranston: If and when the role lands in your lap, don’t gain weight for it — wear prosthetic blubber (face, jowl, gut).

Presuming that a teaser for Damian Chazelle‘s La-La Land will in fact debut four days hence in theatres playing Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society (Amazon / Lionsgate, 7.15), I’m guessing it’ll also appear online the same day if not before…right?

Incidentally: I caught a screening of Cafe Society Saturday evening at Soho House. My initial viewing was in Cannes, where it got a few more chuckles. (Here’s my mezzo-positive review.) The Soho House screening room is heaven — easily the most luxurious, ass-friendly facility in town. I attended with HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and producer-editor David Scott Smith. There was a lovey-dovey couple in their 40s sitting in front of us, huddling and kissing before the film began. They bailed 20 minutes before it ended. As they were ducking out I was bad-vibing them. ADD sufferers, lightweights, etc.

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The heat and fire of the 2016 primary season came from the almost interchangable grass-roots support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — the angry cry of those who feel that the deck is totally stacked in favor of the corrupt elite. Hillary Clinton climbed aboard that train and obviously rode it to great success, but she didn’t tap into that primal connection that people felt for Bernie and Donald — not really.

And I just don’t see how she can run her general election campaign without stating emphatically and convincingly that the wave that propelled Bernie to so many wins (anger against an impossibly rigged system) will be an essential component in her approach to steering the country over the next four to eight years. And by this I mean she has to make Elizabeth Warren her vp — there’s really no other way.

Because Warren is the only eloquent, well-known firebrand who’s 110% invested in the Sanders message, and who arguably expresses her convictions and outrage with more persuasion than Bernie ever did. She’s the only 1% buster who matters, who not only embraces but embodies what the whole ’16 primary season was largely about.

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I’ve been hating on Asian action aesthetics (i.e., John Woo blam-blammers, sword ballet flicks, martial arts anything) for roughly two decades, but over the last few years my disdain has been focused on the moronic taste buds and grotesque influence of the Chinese movie market. Particularly when combined with the popularity of videogame flicks. You could argue that adapting video games into features is a double-down strategy as fantasy tentpoles have been aping the videogame aesthetic for a good decade or so. Either way they seem a safe bet when you factor in the overseas market.

The Angry Birds Movie (5.20.16) earned a modest $105,936,416 domestic but a $337,542,301 total worldwide. The recently popped Warcraft (6.10.16) earned a modest $46,510,135 here but $383,500,000 overseas for an eye-popping worldwide total of $430,010,135. I refused to sit through it, of course, but the combined Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes tallies underline where Chinese moviegoers are at on the evolutionary scale. Remember the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001?

The next videogame biggie is Justin Kurzel‘s Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21) with HE non-favorite Michael Fassbender (the chilly stare, the surly frown) playing the lead/cashing the check. Death to Assassin’s Creed, death to the creative visions of Kurzel/Fassbender (they made the gray, grime-gunky Macbeth together), death to the Chinese. I don’t really mean “death” — I just mean “thanks, guys, for cranking out and supporting this spreading mushroom-cloud influence upon cinema and world culture.” I’m sure all the participants will profit handily, and that swaggering Fassbender (who also produced) will be lighting his cigars with $100 bills when his participation checks begin to roll in.

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Pokemon GO is just insane right now. This is in Central Park. It's basically been HQ for Pokemon GO. pic.twitter.com/3v2VfEHzNA

— Jonathan Perez (@IGIhosT) July 11, 2016

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This morning I was typing out my Ghostbusters review on the outside front porch at WeHo’s Le Pain Quotidien, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that several heavy-footed people were walking to and fro. I’m talking about fairly heavy impact sounds (“thump! boom! thump! boom!”) and especially the vibrations — those poor wooden beams shuddering from all that heavy-heel action.

I noticed this morning even 95-pound pixie women were walking this way….boom! boom! Like little grenades going off. The fact is that relatively few people walk in a light-footed way, as I try to do. I at least try to not pound my heels into the floor. I try to walk like Vaslav Nijinsky or Rudolf Nureyev.

I remember pointing this out to my younger sister when I was 11 or 12. I told her she sounded like a sumo wrestler coming down the stairs, and I demonstrated how you can glide down the stairs like Jimmy Cagney or Fred Astaire.

I realize, of course, that over half of those reading this don’t have clue #1 who Nurevev, Nijinksy, Cagney or Astaire were.