Talking Point Memo‘s Tierney Sneed is reporting that Jeb Bush has cynically dummied up when asked about the apparent motives of Charleston shooter Dylann Roof. When asked if he thought the attack was racially motivated, Bush told a Huffington Post reporter, “I don’t know.” The question came after a speech Bush made at a Faith and Freedom Coalition summit in Washington. Then came the death quote: “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes, but I do know what was in the heart of the victims.” Translation: “I don’t want to risk alienating the right-wing racist yokel vote in the primaries so let’s sidestep the racial-hate stuff and concentrate on empathizing with the God-worshipping victims.” Let me explain something very clearly: Jeb Bush’s candidacy is dead in a general-election sense. Maybe not with the Republicans and Tea Party-ers but he’s finished nationally. The man is a calculating soul-less fiend. He’s just side-stepped himself into eternal infamy.

“Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and at other times flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs and so on….zzzzzz. It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, portions of which dealt with more or less the same realm.

“The tale, such as it is, is told from the perspective of Emily Blunt‘s FBI field agent, who, being a 21st Century woman who’s in touch with her emotions, is of course stunned and devastated by the unrelenting carnage blah blah. You know what I’d like to see just once? A female FBI agent who isn’t in touch with her emotions, or at least one who tones it down when it comes to showing them. Too much to ask for, right?

“One of her battle-hardened colleagues, a senior veteran with a semi-casual ‘whatever works, bring it on’ attitude, is played by the ever-reliable Josh Brolin. My favorite character by far was Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro, a shadowy Mexican operative with burning eyes and his own kind of existential attitude about things. Benicio the sly serpent…the shaman with the drooping eyelids…the slurring, purring, south-of-the-border vibe guy.

Does the story of heroic commercial airplane pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger strike anyone as a nutritious film? Clint Eastwood will direct a Warner Bros. feature about Sully with Tom Hanks (who else?) playing “Captain Cool.” On 1.15.09 Sully and his co-pilot took off from LaGuardia in a well-loaded Airbus, hit a flock of geese, lost both engines and then quickly decided to land on the Hudson River. The water was colder than a bastard but everyone survived. I’m sorry but there’s a short film here but no movie. A pilot acted coolly under pressure and saved the lives of his passengers — a single, perfect, beautiful act of professional cool. But the whole episode from takeoff to landing lasted…what, 15 minutes? 20? Where’s the inciting incident? Where’s the story tension? Where’s the second act complication or story pivot? Where’s the fucking story? Sully experienced a little post-traumatic stress disorder (flashes, sleeplessness) after the episode but he got through it. Sully will almost certainly turn out to be a rote exercise in hero worship, and I mean especially with Hanks doing his low-key, man-of-character, professionalism-under-pressure routine for the 37th time.

Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult have reunited under director Gilles Paquet-Brenner with a screenplay by Gone Girl‘s Gillian Flynn. The “traumatized lead character wakes up from a nightmare” moment suggests that genuine lightning strikes very occasionally and in fact rarely. Costarring Corey Stoll, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Tye Sheridan, Dora Madison Burge and Drea de Matteo. (Where’s Drea been since she got whacked on The Sopranos?) Dark Places will debut on Directv’s video-on-demand service this week, followed by a theatrical break on 8.7.

As part of a quid pro quo deal in having accepted a new NBC News gig as “breaking news anchor for live special reports,” Brian Williams has issued the following statement:

“I’m sorry. I said things that weren’t true. I let down my NBC colleagues and our viewers, and I’m determined to earn back their trust. I will greatly miss working with the team on Nightly News, but I know the broadcast will be in excellent hands with Lester Holt as anchor. I will support him 100% as he has always supported me. I am grateful for the chance to return to covering the news. My new role will allow me to focus on important issues and events in our country and around the world, and I look forward to it.”

What Williams Should Have Said: “I’m sorry I got caught lying. I tried to equivocate and sidestep and tap-dance my way out of the problem but…well, it didn’t work. So now I’m really ‘sorry.’ You get what I’m saying, right?

“The offshoot is that I’ve been offered a chance to come back.  Not to NBC News but MSNBC. I won’t exactly be Lester Holt‘s breaking-news bitch but it wouldn’t be far off the mark to call me that. I like the idea of collecting a check and being a working newsman again, but by any standard this is a humiliating, take-it-or-leave-it punishment position in which I’ll have to play the role of a demoted and discredited anchor who has a tendency to lie…I mean ‘exaggerate.’ I’ll have to do a lot of smiling. I’ll have to do a shitload of yoga in the mornings. Maybe Lester will occasionally ask me to run to the deli and pick up a chicken salad sandwich and a hot tea with a bag of chips for lunch. Maybe I could shine shoes on the side.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all the facts but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is a time for mourning and for healing, but let’s be clear. At some point we as a country will have to have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”

Posted by Indiewire’s Eric Kohn: “The success of Jurassic World obscures the more enterprising possibility for cinema to advance toward new horizons. Rather than settling with a formula that sticks, movies should be celebrated for building on past successes or upending them altogether. Mad Max: Fury Road is an ideal example, but in the 32 days since its release it has yet to gross as much as Jurassic World made on opening weekend. It’s easy to give audiences what they want and harder to convince them to take on a challenge. Jurassic World provides the latest evidence of this frustrating tendency, which studios all too eagerly exploit.” Fury Road is a “challenge”?

Kohn references a description of Jurassic World by critic Sam Adams as “a metaphor for itself…a bad movie about why movies are so bad.”

“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” — statement attributed to Dylann Storm Roof, 21, identified as the murderer of nine worshippers at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last night.

Alleged church murderer and white-supremacist Dylann Roof, 21.

Standard racist hate stuff. Straight out of Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning with a 21st Century refresh. Tea Party spokespersons will arch their backs and deny it to Kingdom Come, of course, but an aggrieved fear of multiculturalism is where a significant portion of their flock are coming from. Ignorance and malice are generally passed-on qualities and not manifested out of whole cloth. And they are always helped along by those twin bugaboos of the American yahoo class — an insufficient brain-cell count along with a lack of education.

Roof was a legal adult, but those who sired and raised him are obliged to answer questions today and for the rest of their lives. Cue the friends, former classmates and next-door neighbors who always found Roof to be a quiet, polite, low-key guy who kept to himself.

Update: Roof has been captured in Shelby, N.C. It’s been revealed in the press conference that Roof hails from Lexington, South Carolina.

People, Places, Things is another schlumpies & dumpies relationship movie. Jemaine Clement simply isn’t sexy or good looking enough to have a dishy wife. He’s nice enough looking but just not attractive enough for the likes of her…sorry. Guys like him get married to moderately fetching, not-very-hot women as a rule. And look at the fat guy Clement’s wife is cheating with! He’s the slightly younger cousin of Harry Knowles. Lardy guys get lucky from time to time, I suppose, but the natural order and pattern of things seems to argue against this. Would an exceptionally pretty wife cheat on her clever, dweeby, ten-day-beardo husband with a guy who could play Santa Claus without a pillow stuffed under his T-shirt? We’re living in the Twilight Zone. The director is James C. Strouse, whom I’ll bet is no Cary Grant himself.

“Hey, look at that red-haired guy with the pot belly! I’m feeling an urge to cheat on my husband, and the instant I saw this fat guy I said to myself, ‘Now there‘s someone worth destroying a marriage for!’ I mean, he looks like Sam Kinison!”

About 20 years ago my parents bought three plots in Wilton’s Hillside Cemetery. My mother passed on Sunday, 6.7. Two days later I called the administrator about depositing her ashes with a small hand spade and she said “that’s not allowed…we have a maintenance professional who does that for plot owners, and our fee is $750.” I respectfully told her that I found this morally offensive. I might have agreed to pay $250 but no way am I paying triple that. (The average funeral in Connecticut runs about $13 grand, I was told by my mother’s accountant.) So I decided to discreetly spread her ashes around the Wilton Playshop, where my mom directed and performed in plays during the ’60s and ’70s. No, I didn’t ask permission. Her friends (which included renowned opera singer Betty Jones) just drove there en masse after last Saturday’s memorial gathering at Cobbs Mill Inn. I scattered the ashes in the ivy near the base of the theatre foundation and in a nearby garden area and into a flowing waterfall across the road. A perfect spot. If my mom could somehow learn of this she’d be delighted.

Sometime between last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon something happened to Zak, my one-year-old ragdoll. “Meow Mike”, my cat-feeder guy, said he last saw Zak on Saturday afternoon. If he’d been run over somebody would’ve probably read his name tag and called me but nobody has. Plus local authorities say they have no reports of any dead cats in my area. So the best guess is that (a) some malignant life form kidnapped him and drove off to Pico Rivera or Victorville or Gardena or Bellflower or (b) some thoughtless asshole within a two-block radius is “taking care” of him and not bothering with the fact that Zak has an owner. It’s a major heartbreaker on top of losing my mom a week and a half ago. No, I don’t believe in keeping cats prisoner inside a home or apartment. You can’t raise an animal and not let him/her feel the wind, walk on the grass, see the stars in the sky, feel the sun of his/her face, smell the flowers, etc. If it means a shorter life then that’s what it means. I am not a jailer. I do not work for the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. Last night I made up a bunch of “SEEN THIS GUY?” posters (catchy with color photos) at Kinkos and stapled them on a few local trees, taped them to juncture boxes, etc.