My spitballs are (a) definitely Mark Meadows, (b) probably Rudy Guiliani, (c) possibly John Eastman. Further speculation?

Oh, and by the way? If I were Fani Willis I wouldn’t entertain ambitions to run for public office down the road. She’s presumably an excellent attorney but to say she has an awkward speaking style is putting it mildly. She reminded me of Tiffany Haddish announcing the Oscar noms in 2018. You can feel her struggling as she reads the particulars.

If you want to cut to the chase in the matter of Michael Oher‘s Blind Side lawsuit against Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (and their response to same), you may want to read Leigh Steinberg‘s 2.9.15 Forbes article, titled “5 Reasons Why 80% Of Retired NFL Players Go Broke.”

From yesterday’s boilerplate HE piece:

ESPN’s Michael Fletcher: “[Oher] alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

“The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story ‘that would not have existed without him.’”

In other words the Tuohys are shifty and slippery, baby, and Oher wants a cut of that money, honey.

The classy, movingly scored new teaser for Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix, 11.22 theatrical) tells us quite plainly that the film is less about the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and more about the 27-year marriage between Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).

The emphasis, in fact, seems to be 60/40 in favor of Felicia. The trailer suggests, in fact, if it wasn’t called Maestro Cooper could have gone with something like Duet or The Two of Us. They were very comfortable with each other, the footage says…they vibed quite nicely.

While the mixed footage (color and monochrome) and choice editing allude to a difficult, imperfect relationship when Lenny and Felicia hit middle age (there are brief bits in which (a) Lenny hair-strokes a young hawk-nosed dude at a party and (b) Felicia catches Lenny making a pass at the same guy in a hallway) but Lenny being gay…well, it’s there but a trailer can’t delve into the fact that their marriage was based on a sensible and civilized arrangement — i.e., “wealthy famous gay guy married to beard wife for the purposes of public image, not to mention the kids.”

If anything the teaser is suggesting Lenny was bi. (He wasn’t.) That plus “their relationship was fraught and strained but always musical.”

And of course, the teaser doesn’t contain the briefest flickering reference to the Bernsteins’ Black Panther party (Tom Wolfe‘s “that party at Lenny’s“).

As noted, Maestro will hit theatres on 11.22.23 (i.e., JFK day), and will thereby go head to head with Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon. Can someone come up with a Barbenheimer moniker that blends the two? Okay, I’ve got one: Maestroleon.

Seriously — can someone please get to work on a Maestroleon poster concept?

Maestro will begin streaming on Netflix on 12.20.23. It will probably be given a special premiere showing at the 2023 New York Film Festival…maybe.

“All great black leaders get killed.” — quote from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth (’98).

As it turns out Beatty’s Senator Jay Bulworth, one of the blackest white politicians who ever served in a fictional feature, gets killed also — shot by an insurance industry villain played by Paul Sorvino.

Bulworth is a Democrat from California and a total liberal establishment guy with all the usual noble sentiments and allegiances (photos of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King on his office wall) that have never amounted to much.

The film begins with Bulworth in deep despair and sick of all the bullshit. The film is basically about Bulworth saying “fuck it” and and just stating plain and straight how things really are, and hang the freakin’ consequences.

Friendo: “Last night I rewatched Bulworth for the first time since it came out in 1998 — a quarter-century ago. Very funny, totally outrageous, sometimes cringe-worthy and…oh, yeah, Halle Berry was totally hot.

“I got to thinking how this film would be received today. I know you’re gonna say the wokesters would go off on it, but maybe, just maybe, they’d see it for the satire it is. And maybe they’d understand that it asks the question ‘What would happen if a politician finally told the honest truth about our political system?’

“On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 76% approval rating, but not one of the critics listed is black. So how did black critics (outside of Elvis Mitchell) view it? How many influential black critics were even around back then?

“I know that black audiences didn’t attend screenings of Bulworth in droves, despite its focus upon black culture and featuring quite a few black characters. Maybe they felt vaguely alienated by Bulworth’s remarks about black behaviors (‘If you don’t put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you’re never gonna get rid of someone like me!’). Or maybe not.

“Either way Bulworth, which cost round $30 million to produce, ended up with a relative slender gross of $29 million. It obviously didn’t connect with certain segments of the public for certain reasons. The only segment that seemed to support it were white, well-educated urban liberals.

“Bulworth has to be one of the most audacious mainstream films ever made. I think it deserves a reassessment.”

Friendo: “My wife and I thought Barbie’s opening riff on 2001‘s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence was hilarious. We guffawed all through it, and yet we might have been the only ones in the audience who seemed to get it. Everyone else was stone-faced, no chuckling or tittering of any kind.

“I’ve since spoken to two well-educated women in their early 40s (one is a cardiologist) who’ve both seen Barbie, and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that scene.

“One has seen 2001 but has forgotten all about the opening scene (apes in the desert, animal bones, the black monolith); the other had never even heard of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1968 groundbreaker.

“What does this say about the average person’s film literacy?”

HE to friendo: Anyone who’s been educated at a good college or university should know at least a little something about everything, and hopefully everything about something.

I would say that your second well-educated woman (not the cardiologist) was either (a) cutting a lot of classes or (b) decided to stop educating herself after she graduated. I’m guessing it’s probably the latter.

And how the cardiologist could have possibly seen 2001 and not remembered the “Dawn of Man” sequence…she’s either lying about having seen it or was in the bathroom for the first ten minutes.

On a fine Sunday afternoon (i.e., yesterday or 8.13), Jeff and Sasha hopped around from topic to topic like Br’er Rabbit —- hippity-hop, hippity-hop. It’s a little early to call any Oscars, but (a) white male filmmakers will once again face an uphill challenge and (b) how does Greta Gerwig not land a Best Director Oscar EARLY next year? Plus a short riff on Jules, the white-skinned, black-eyed alien who befriends Ben Kingsley while sharing a move from David Cronenberg’s Scanners.

Again, the link.

Halfway through her q & a transcript (8.14) with Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde, Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel asks whether he has any regrets about casting QAnon nutter Jim Caviezel in the lead role.

Monteverde: “I try to never look back into any regrets because there’s nothing I can do about it now. Jim came to the set. I’ve never seen somebody so committed and so professional on set. He came in and really bled for the film.”

Siegel’s follow-up question, obviously, should have gone something like this: “So your film won a fair amount of respect for sticking to the basics, for being a lean and mean thriller that was almost entirely free of rightwing talking points, and it’s made a ton of money — $173 million in the U.S. and Canada, which is higher than the domestic tally of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.

“So given all the this accomplishment and begrudging respect from at least the fair-minded critics and pundits out there, what is your understanding about why Angel Studios and Caviezel arranged a special golf-club screening for Donald Trump, who, you may have heard, is a proven criminal, a salivating sociopath and a deranged, egomaniacal Mussolini who’s under three criminal indictments and is facing a fourth in Georgia?

“Why, in short, did Angel and Caviezel poison the well by doing this? Why invite Hannibal Lecter into the chicken coop?