Update: The Daily Show‘s Jessica Williams posted the following Sunday on Twitter: “I’m not hosting. Thank you but I am extremely under-qualified for the job! At this age (25) if something happens politically that I don’t agree with, I need to go to my room & like not come out for, like, 7 days. That being said I am super not right for it, but there are quite a few people who are! Can’t wait to stick around & see what happens.”

Earlier: HE readers have presumably heard or more precisely been informed that 25 year-old Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams will replace Jon Stewart later this year. The decision was more or less confirmed a couple of days ago when a clip from Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (Paramount, 2.20) announced that Williams will be sitting in Stewart’s chair ten years hence. Williams is sharp, punchy, brilliant, tall, pointed…a cool choice. Then again most of her Daily Show reports have been, naturally enough, about the perspective of a 25 year-old black woman dealing with sexism, racial profiling and other oppressive cards dealt by old or old-ish white assholes. (Including liberal ones.) And after reviewing some of Williams’ clips this morning, I have to say I felt a slight pause. I’m wondering if even 20something guys will continue to watch The Daily Show as often with Jessica using it as a soapbox to fight the power and redress wrongs for you-go-girls.

After a six-year delay David O. Russell‘s…sorry, Stephen Greene‘s Accidental Love has begun streaming, and has been panned by a small handful. I saw it last night, expecting the expected. But I found it spirited, often amusing and even delightful in short spurts. I’m telling you at the very least that Rodrigo Perez‘s Indiewire pan is way too harsh. Accidental Love is far from a knockout but it’s no disaster either. It’s a minor Russell detour and obviously years out of date (it’s basically a “we all need decent health care!” piece) but portions of this incomplete governmental farce, previously known as Nailed, are far better than indicated by the subdued buzz, particularly in view of Russell having washed his hands of it years ago.

Now and then Accidental Love reminded me of the tone and attitude of Russell’s much-praised American Hustle. While Hustle is probably a better, more fully developed piece, certainly by the standards of most critics, I enjoyed the occasionally inspired Love a bit more. It doesn’t work all that well but it’s insane fun at times. Certainly if you watch it as a flawed thing that will kick into gear every so often and that’s all. I don’t need films to work all around the track if they’re got a few special fragments, and that’s more or less the case here.

No devotee of mind-bending, zeitgeist-reflecting cinema will deny that William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53) is one of the most essential sci-fi films of all time — a spooky, purposefully unreal, intensely nightmarish thing that used kid-POV storytelling, surreal dreamscape images and one of the all-time creepiest scores ever composed. (The stone genius behind the famous “sand choir” theme was Raoul Kraushaar.) Last night I thought it might be fun to watch Invaders again via Amazon HD streaming, but it’s not available. On any streaming service apparently. And there’s only one DVD left, according to Amazon, and it’ll cost you $177 dollars plus shipping. That’s because the last DVD release, courtesy of the long-defunct United American Video, came out 13 years ago and nobody has re-upped. A Bluray of Invaders From Mars, which is 18 or 19 times better than Tobe Hooper‘s 1986 remake (which is being being Bluray’ed in April), might not be economically feasible, but an HD version should be streaming at the very least.

The bad guy here. I’m told, is Kansas City-based rights-owner Wade Williams, who holds the rights to Invaders From Mars and owns the original elements. Williams apparently won’t let anyone do a digital HD upgrade without being paid an exorbitant, completely unrealistic fee. Williams is regarded as a notorious “rights squatter” who thinks and operates in the mule-headed tradition of Raymond Rohauer.

I reviewed Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper a little more than three months ago. I’m reposting in case any Academy members who’re reading this are thinking of putting Sniper in their #1 position for Best Picture: “American Sniper is a first-rate visceral combat flick — definitely a ride and a half in that respect — with a slight melancholy undertow and a not-so-hot domestic subplot. The several Iraq War combat sequences are major heartbeat accelerators — nervy, rousing, exquisitely shot and cut — and yet, oddly, Sniper never quite lifts off the pad. Well, it lifts off but then it comes back down. Up, down, steady as she goes, less up, down, up again.

“There’s something a bit rote and at times even flat about portions of it, and that means, no offense, that altogether Sniper is not quite blue ribbon. But it’s certainly good enough if you adjust your expectations and you’re not expecting something, you know, Oscar-baity.

“Sniper is basically one of those ‘guy grew up this way and then he met this girl and joined the military after 9/11 and then this happened and that happened” films. The subject is a guy-guy — the late, legendary Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle— who lived quite large in a sense, which is to say mythically by killing 160 enemy combatants during his four tours in Iraq. It tells an intriguing and at times suspenseful tale but not my idea of a great one, and while it ends on a tragic note it doesn’t deliver anything you could call a knockout finish — it doesn’t hit you on the side of the head like a waffle iron, which is how I felt at the end of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam, which I first saw last June at L.A. FilmFest. It is, I feel, her best film ever and one of the two finest competing for the Best Feature-Length Documentary Oscar, the other being Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour. Kennedy and I spoke this afternoon for about 17 minutes. She’s been making docs for 16 years, but I didn’t really pay attention until Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (’07), which pretty much everyone admired, and particularly the emotionally affecting Ethel, which I saw at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and later aired on HBO on 10.18.12. Last Days in Vietnam has made a big impression because of its humanity. It’s a doc about Americans who showed compassion and decency and stuck their neck out for their Vietnamese friends during the final days of the Vietnam War. I’ve told Kennedy before that it’s a shame Last Days will probably never be seen in Vietnam due to presumed objections over political content. The Hanoi government would probably argue with Kennedy’s portrayal of the victorious North Vietnamese forces looking to settle scores with thousands of South Vietnamese who threw in their lot with American forces, which of course they did. (Tens of thousands were murdered or otherwise taken to task.) Kennedy’s film doesn’t lie but her main thrust is not political or tactical criticism but an honoring of loyalty and humane instincts and taking care of your own. Nobody’s angry about the war over there any more. I visited Vietnam in 2012 and ’13, and my sense was that the citizens have moved on and are living in the present. The young guys I met in Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An were all into iPhones and iPads and making money and getting ahead as best they could. I think they’d understand and admire Kennedy’s doc if they had a chance to see it. Again, the mp3.

“If there’s any good news here, it’s that, despite rumors to the contrary, Accidental Love is very much a coherent movie. It’s not incomplete; it’s just been sloppily completed—cobbled together, in other words, by [distribution guys] looking to salvage a releasable product out of footage crying out to be reshot or reworked. Yet traces of David O. Russell’s spirit, a humane screwball exuberance, poke through the compromised results. It’s there in the way the movie keeps stuffing a bunch of yammering eccentrics in a room together, and also in the bug-eyed performance the director coaxes out of Jake Gyllenhaal, whose character — a flip-flopping, libidinous politician — could have fit neatly into American Hustle. Russell fans owe it to themselves to see this disowned disaster, painful as that act of completism will be.” — from A.A. Dowd‘s A.V. Club review of a facsimile of Russell’s never-completed Nailed, partially shot in ’08 and now called, as noted, Accidental Love and currently viewable on VOD. I’ve been wondering about this film for over six years and tonight, finally, I finally get to see it.

I did a brief chat with Citizenfour director Laura Poitras during last week’s Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. I don’t know why I forgot to post it, but I was certainly jolted out of my lethargy yesterday when I watched Poitras, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald being interviewed by the late David Carr…less than 24 hours ago! I asked Poitras many of the same questions that everyone else has asked her. I love her film, have seen it five or six times…and so I’m lacking the instinct to do anything but caress and approve. One thing that I hit on (and which Poitras wasn’t interested in…fine) is that it would be great if someone like herself could deliver a strong, American-made doc in the vein of Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares (’04), which introduced an idea that the anti-western Islamic terrorists and the rightie hardliners are almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth. Which was more or less replicated in that “American Taliban” rant that Aaron Sorkin wrote for The Newsroom, and which aired two years ago. Again, the mp3.

Citizenfour director Laura Poitras inside the Hotel Santa Barbara during last week’s Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival.

I’m really going to miss those “Sweet Spot” pre- and post-Oscar chats between N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and the late “Media Equation” columnist David Carr. Scott should continue to do them with the current bagger, Cara Buckley, who today has posted a sad tribute piece to Carr. “Whatever ‘The Sweet Spot’ was, it had a much simpler reason for being,” Scott has written. ” It guaranteed that I would have a few hours a week in the company of David Carr. For anyone who cared about journalism, there was simply no better place to be.” And I’m really, really going to miss Carr’s wonderfully hale and hearty Oscar-race reports from Times Square….pure heaven.

From the good side of the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, a gothic, seemingly Henry James-like horror tale more in the vein of The Devil’s Backbone, Chronos or Pan’s Labrynth than any of GDT’s big whopper monster franchise films…thank God. Perhaps even a touch of Robert Wise‘s The Haunting? Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston as brother and sister. Mia Wasikowska plays a young innocent, recently married to Huddleston, whose last name is Cushing — obviously an homage to Peter Cushing in the Hammer films. Charlie Hunnam plays Dr. Alan McMichael, a “quiet, shy, thoughtful kind of stoic, taciturn, very learned guy who is madly in love with the female hero.” Universal is opening Crimson Peak on 10.16.

The high-water mark for this kind of character-rooted action comedy is, of course, Martin Brest‘s Midnight Run (’88). I don’t want to stick my neck out based on insufficient evidence and/or indications, but it’s probably safe to say that Anne Fletcher‘s Hot Pursuit (originally titled Don’t Mess With Texas) is not on Midnight Run‘s level. But it might be stupidly amusing. A witness needs to be protected from a murdering Mexican drug cartel and Reese Witherspoon‘s superiors figures she can handle it alone? Reese is playing Robert DeNiro, but does her character have any significant character issues that need to be recognized and solved by the end of the film? Sofia Vergara is playing Charles Grodin except she screams and rants and brays instead of doing the dry sardonic thing. If you saw Fletcher’s The Proposal you know there’s legitimate reason for concern. Written by David Feeney and John Quaintance. Opening on 5.8 via Warner Bros.