Likeliest, Well-Fortified, Semi-Inevitable (7)

Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21 — Nolan’s pic diminished after my second viewing because — be honest — it’s overly dense and therefore punishing)
Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (Focus Features, 11.10.23….here’s hoping)
Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie (Warner Bros., 7.21 — enthusiasm is understandable, but it would be wrong, wrong, terribly wrong if Barbie were to win the Best Picture Oscar…don’t do it!)
Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple)
Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple / Paramount)
Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix)
Michael Mann‘s Ferrari (STX)

Semi-Likely (4)

Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24)
Ben Affleck‘s Air (Amazon, 4.5)
Matt Johnson‘s BlackBerry (IFC Films, 5.12)
Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (Amazon/UA releasing)

And The Rest…(10)

David Fincher‘s The Killer (Netflix)
Wes Anderson‘s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix)
Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24)
Blitz Bazawule‘s The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.20)
Todd Haynes‘ May December
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight)
Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid(A24, 4.21)
Sean Durkin‘s The Iron Claw (A24)
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ And (Searchlight — anthology film)
Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest.

The late William Sylvester (1.31.1922 – 1.25.95) became a semi-legendary figure when he played Dr. Heywood R. Floyd, the smug and officious National Council of Astronautics official from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Almost a comically flavorless and dull-minded bureaucrat, Floyd didn’t do or say much — he just flew up from earth to visit Clavius, the moon base, to see about the recently discovered black monolith that had been “deliberately” buried under the moon’s surface some four million years earlier.

One other significant role that Sylvester played was in Gorgo (’61). Sylvester portrayed Sam Slade, a seafaring adventurer of some sort who, along with Cpt. Joe Ryan (Bill Travers), captures Baby Gorgo, a huge prehistoric reptile who is brought to London for public exhibition. Everything seems fine until Ma Gorgo — a much, much larger beast — visits and trashes the city in order to save her son.

I’ve never seen Gorgo but my understanding is that it’s a tolerable mønster flick, but generally second tier. I’m thinking of Sylvester because a new Gorgo Bluray is currently for sale.

…that Colman Domingo‘s performance as Bayard Rustin in Rustin (Netflix, 11.3) will be a bold-as-brass, James Baldwin firecracker-type thing (which the trailer suggests), it seems to me that a film about an historical civil-rights-movement leader who was both Black and gay…that’s two checked boxes right there…plus a film that was launched by Barack and Michele Obama‘s Higher Ground Productions…that’s a third box-check given the urge to show obeisance to the Obamas within liberal circles, etc.

Should we give the possessory credit to the Obamas or director George C. Wolfe?

During his second term in the White House, Barack posthumously awarded Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the 11.20.13 ceremony, Obama presented the award to Walter Naegle, Rustin’s surviving longtime romantic partner.

The almost entirely all-black cast includes Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins and Jeffrey Wright as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell.

Rustin will have its first-anywhere debut at Telluride. If Barack and Michelle don’t fly in and take a few bows, the troops will be bitterly disappointed.

…and a black floral-print shirt (fairly similar to Montgomery Clift‘s Hawaiian-style shirt that he wore in From Here to Eternity) under what looks like a Brian DePalma safari jacket.

I respect and admire the blending of a noir palette with a watercolor effect, which may have been achieved via standard photo manipulation using Average Joe software…the kind you can buy on any iPhone.

David Fincher‘s The Killer premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, 9.3 — six days hence. It will open in “select” theatres on Friday, 10.27. The Netflix debut happens on Friday, 11.10.

Marketing tag line: “After a fateful near miss an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.”

Sutton on Sunday means that I don’t post my usual quota of five or six stories. I am, however, posting today (Monday, 8.28) from West Orange, New Jersey. At 6 pm I’ll be catching an all-media screening of Denzel Whupass in Italy (i.e., The Equalizer 3) at the Regal Union Square. And then over to an Airbnb rental two or three blocks from LaGuardia. My flight to Albuquerque leaves tomorrow morning at 9:30 am. I may or may not be in Telluride by Tuesday night, but I’ll certainly be there by noon Wednesday. Planes and automobiles, unfortunately no trains.

Maggie Haberman to Jake Tapper (Friday, 8.25, beginning at 1:30 mark):

“[Trump] doesn’t want to look weak. In his mind, he [projected strength because] he didn’t concede. And that has been how he has operated for decade after decade after decade…through business failures, though bankruptcies of his casinos, through losses, through products failing, through divorces…if you pretend it is not happening, if you create your own reality, if you don’t give in to what other people are acknowledging as objective reality, then maybe it isn’t really there.

“He is somebody who doesn’t think in terms of long-term strategy…he thinks in very short increments of time….and it’s all about just getting from one post to another.

“This doesn’t really get said enough about [Trump], which is that he lived a fairly consequence-free life before he was President…he did not like the press [and] was very unhappy about it..but he [always] had his father to bail him out, and has moved from one thing to another without having to face the kind of consequences that other people might have [to deal with].”

Four and a half weeks ago (6.26.23) an ABC News story out of Osseo, Minnesota, reported by Kristina Watrobski, stated the following:

“Teachers for students as young as elementary school are allegedly being trained to discuss gender identity and conceal students’ preferred pronouns from their parents in a Minnesota school district.

“Two parents read a letter written by an Osseo Area Schools (ISD 279) elementary school teacher during the district’s school board meeting [on Tuesday, 6.20]. The teacher claims that ISD 279 employees were required to attend a training called ‘Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools’ earlier this year.

The letter detailed several aspects of the training that the ISD 279 elementary school teacher felt uncomfortable with, including employees being asked to discuss their ‘definition of gender’ before learning the district’s own definition.

One year earlier (6.21.22) Osseo’s Maple Grove High School announced that the school board had approved LGBTQIA+ history and culture resolution. Read the first five or six graphs — it’s a beaut.

Cue HE’s Crazy Town pushback brigade…”this isn’t true, it’s been made up by evil transphobes, there’s no such things as grooming of young children,” etc.

YouTube commenters: “Imagine living in a society where child abuse is not only condoned but glorified…childhood used to be about playing with your friends, enjoying ice cream and learning basic math, science and history — now it’s all about sexuality and defining your gender…get your kids out of the public school system…in my day we used to call it child grooming, and it was criminal…I applaud this woman for her bravery against the evil in our schools…it’s not about education any longer, but indoctrination…I’m a retired teacher , this is appalling and so dangerous…this is just disgusting and crazy…School is about reading, writing, math, history etc., and not gender or sexuality…this insanity must stop.”

This evening I tried again with John Ford‘s The Informer> (’35), and in so doing experienced something like an epiphany. It surprised the hell out of me, but there was no mistaking what I was feeling. For the first time I accepted the foolishness and rank idiocy of Victor McLaglen‘s Gypo Nolan — surely one of the most loathsome lead characters in movie history, and a pathetic, bellowing drunk to boot.

For the first time I cut Gypo a break and took off my black hooded mask.

My first viewing….good God, Ford’s classic is 88 years old now…my first viewing (late-night TV, possibly WOR-TV) happened when I was ten or eleven, something like that; my most recent before tonight was 20 years ago.

I’ve never felt anything but admiration for the various elements — McLaglen’s Oscar-winning lead performance, Dudley Nichols‘ finely-chiselled screenplay (the film only runs 91 minutes), the magnificent fog-shrouded cinematography by Joseph August (Twentieth Century, Gunga Din,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Portrait of Jennie), Max Steiner‘s haunting score and the supporting performances by Margot Grahame, Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Una O’Connor and Joe Sawyer.

It all fuses together so well, but all my life I’ve had a hugely difficult time with the deplorable Gypo. And yet something happened this time. Something ineffably sad that found its way inside. By the end I felt so sorry for this poor alcoholic idiot that I was strangely unable to despise him. I could only shake my head in sorrow.

And that final church scene after he’s been shot four or five times in the gut, bleeding to death…that scene got me all the more. When Gypo stumbles into a church and finds Frankie’s mother (Merkel) and says with that pleading, nearly whispering, wounded-ox voice, “Twas I who informed on your son, Mrs. McPhillip…forgive me.” And the poor woman does for some reason, and then comforts him with “you didn’t know what you were doin’.” Gypo stands and spreads his arms before a crucifix, calls out to the man he betrayed and condemned to a brutal death (“”Frankie! Your mother forgives me!”), clutches his midsection, drops to the church floor and dies.

If I’d been Mrs. McPhillip I would have said, “You’ll get no forgiveness from me, Gypo. And from the looks of you, you won’t be needing any soon. Just let go…just let it go. There’s nothin’ more for it, Gypo. Just go to sleep.”

But somehow this evening, and for the first time in my life, Merkel’s forgiving eyes and words melted me down.

I thought of two relatively recent similar films (a protagonist enduring terrible guilt after ratting out a comrade) — Yuval Adler and Ali Waked‘s Bethlehem (’13) and Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah (’21) about FBI informant William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) having inadvertently aided in the murder of Fred Hampton.

Amazon should be ashamed of itself, by the way, for streaming an HD version of The Informer with a horizontally stretched aspect ratio — it should be presented in the original boxy (1.33 or 1.37) but is streaming at 1.85 or 16 x 9 or something close to that.