I love listening to Oliver Stone expound on any subject — everything he says is human, honest, heartfelt, perceptive. But I couldn’t listen at the beginning of this chat with Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday because he couldn’t get the framing right. His phone wouldn’t hold position and kept tipping upwards. And he’s sitting too far back. Oliver finally got it after four or five minutes.

The interview is about the paperback edition of Stone’s “Chasing The Light.”

Chilly, calculating eyes are fairly common in any social business environment. Some peepers may radiate inner warmth or sincerity, of course, but many don’t. I personally don’t think you can really “read” anyone’s eyes unless you have close proximity. And yet Christian Bale once (allegedly) claimed he could sense coldness or emptiness behind Tom Cruise‘s eyes. So if Bale went there, it’s fair to ask the HE community who else seems to have a certain robotic vacancy behind the eyes.

Not discerning or shrewd eyes — that’s something else. I mean eyes that block and tell you nothing.

“Everyone reflexively smiles when they meet people socially. Some smile slightly, some a little too much but often with the same glazed eyes. Not much sincerity offered or expected. Mostly. Their teeth are gleaming but their eyes are scanning you like a Manhattan detective, trying to assess your nature or strengths or potential threat levels in the space of two or three seconds.

“I felt this when I met CAA honcho Mike Ovitz in ’88 — he had the eyes of a timber wolf. The eyes of MPAA president Jack Valenti, whom I met in ’84 at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, weren’t as feral but he was definitely sizing me up.” — posted on 9.25.16.

“You got cop’s eyes” — Julie Harris to Paul Newman in Jack Smight‘s Harper (’66).

“I walked with him, right beside him, back into the hotel. And his eyes rested upon mine a couple of times. He didn’t know me well, only slightly. And his eyes were absolutely cold, always…really cold gray. The smile was in the [eye] crinkles and in the mouth and the big teeth, but the eyes always remained, I always thought, very cold and calculating.” — Robert MacNeil on JFK on 11.22.63, 2:10 to 2:31, emmytvlegends.org.

You don’t have to agree with, much less admire, a politician or activist to acknowledge that they showed courage by sticking to their principles under fire.

In yesterday’s riff about the trailer for Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (Focus Features, 7.30), I shared reservations about Matt Damon‘s “yokelish Midwesterner who probably loves Donald Trump and resembles those generic beastly types who stormed the Capitol.

“I’m sorry but I don’t care for heavy-set fellows who swallow their words…vaguely surly, low-key clock punchers who drawl ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’ and still insist the election was stolen…I love hanging with super-smart reporters who work for the Boston Globe, but not Jesse Plemons gutty-wuts like this.”

To which Correcting Jeff wrote, “At least Wells owns being an ass.”

HE to Correcting Jeff: “In what way exactly is it asinine to say what I said above?

“Audiences like certain characters and they dislike others. It’s a common, natural process. Basic human appeal, intelligence, decency, spunk, charisma, relatability, compelling energy…these things and more go into determining whether you want to hang with a certain character for the length of a feature film or not.

“I was persuaded by the Stillwater trailer that I don’t especially want to hang with Damon’s burly hinterland character. Based on the lack of above-mentioned qualities. How exactly does this make me an ass?

“If McCarthy and Damon had simply agreed before shooting that Damon’s overly performed bumblefuck character would be too much of an obstacle for people like me, and that the wiser course would be to have Damon drop 15 or 20 pounds and play the guy as if he’s Matt Damon, the movie star, only from Oklahoma — a guy with an intelligent appreciation of the life’s ins and outs, no blue-collar baseball hat, no swallowing of consonants, no cornbelt accent — if they’d done this the movie would be A LOT more appealing.

“I don’t want to spend two hours with a schlubby guy whose friends, one imagines, could have easily stormed the U.S. Capitol on 1.6.21.”

My Warner Archive Bluray of They Won’t Believe Me (’47) arrived yesterday; I watched it last night. Produced by Joan Harrison, written by Jonathan Latimer and directed by Irving Pichel, this RKO release has acquired a reputation in some circles as a tasty, extra-dark potboiler — required viewing if you’re any kind of film-noir fanatic.

It’s dark, all right, and I’m not sorry I saw it, but it’s a completely unbelievable, ridiculously over-plotted piece about a doomed nogoodnik — Robert Young‘s slimey, squishy, wholly unsympathetic Larry Ballentine**. The plot is mainly about how Ballentine hoodwinks, strings along and betrays three women — a gold-digger (Susan Hayward), a journalist (Jane Greer) and his rich, endlessly forgiving wife (Rita Johnson).

It makes no sense that Hayward, Greer and Johnson are each in love with Young — he’s obviously a waste of skin. If “they won’t believe me” is Ballentine’s lament, the obvious reply is “why the hell should they?”

The only aspect that really works (in a WTF, blunt-trauma way) is the bizarre ending when Ballentine, on trial for killing his wife Greta, tries to commit suicide by leaping out of a courtroom window on the fifth or sixth floor, just before the verdict is announced. A trigger-happy marshall shoots and kills Ballentine as he reaches the window ledge. And then they read the verdict.

I’ve honestly never disliked a lead character as much as this, and Young’s performance is no help. He’s playing an absolute cipher and a cad — a Shallow Hal with no smarts, no passion, no cunning, no wit, no sense of irony about himself, no style. Robert Mitchum‘s sardonic private detective in Out of the Past is shady but likable — Young is detestable. Within minutes you’re rooting for his demise. It’s no surprise that They Won’t Believe Me flopped.

If your idea of an A-level noir is Out of the Past, Double Indemnity or The Big Sleep, rest assured that They Won’t Believe Me is at best a C.

The 4K transfer has been nicely finessed — the 74 year-old film looks as good as it ever will. A nice silvery sheen, excellent black levels, finely detailed.

I was so bored I began thinking about Young’s actual life, and how he was plagued by alcoholism and depression despite a career that enjoyed a fair amount of comfort from playing the title roles in two popular, long-running TV shows, Father Knows Best (’54 to ’60) and Marcus Welby (’69 to ’76). The poor guy tried to commit suicide when he was 84. (Who does that?) He passed in ’98 at age 91.

I thought last year’s Ellen DeGeneres “mean boss” melodrama (which lasted for several weeks during August and September) had cooled down and that things were more or less chill. Nope! After moving in with Courteney Cox following the sale of her Beverly Hills home, Ellen has decided to quit her show next year. Because…? Ratings, I guess, but the real reason will be kept under wraps as long as humanly possible.

I remember the smell of burning wood and melting rubber during the ’92 Rodney King riots (4.29.92 to 5.4.92), and of course the looting and fire-starting in the east-of-Fairfax district on Melrose during the George Floyd protests (late May to early June). Both were vaguely alarming — the prickly mood, faint currents of discord — but were level 2 or 3 disturbances. This is nothing compared to what people are dealing with in certain pockets of Israel (West Bank) and Gaza right now — level 7 or 8 conditions, war-like, missiles, explosions, black smoke plumes, collapsing buildings, civilian bodies. Imagine being there.

Roughly five weeks ago I caught a trailer for Taylor Sheridan‘s Those Who Wish Me Dead (Warner Bros./HBO Max, 5.14), and it sure seemed like a no-go and a no-sale.

“An aggressively produced, go-for-broke action exploitation flick,” I noted, “shot and edited in a slam-bang, visually searing, Bruce Willis-in-the-’90s way…loaded with jet fuel and cranked WAY TOO HIGH (black-attired bad guy sadists firing automatic weapons at a woman and a kid in the middle of firestorm?). And if you believe, by the way, that a beautiful, super-rich, fashion-magazine icon slash Brad Pitt-ballbuster with her own personal pedicurist can be (or ever could be) a Montana firefighter…well, that’s up to you.”

This just-posted footage tease implies more of the same,

If you read between the lines of David Rooney‘s review of the film itself, posted this morning in The Hollywood Reporter, it’s obvious he has concerns.

Excerpt #1: “If you can get past the miraculously dewy complexion and on-point smoky-eye look of Angelina Jolie as a toughened Montana Forest Service firefighter…”

Excerpt #2: “[Then again] her role provides scope for gnawing demons, maternal warmth and kick-ass survival skills — including some cool retribution with an ax.”

Excerpt #3: “[Pic] doesn’t match the finely etched characterizations and contemplative writing of his original screenplay for Hell or High Water, but even if the genre quilting isn’t entirely seamless, it’s a ruggedly entertaining throwback to studio movies of the ’90s about real people navigating hairy life-or-death situations.”

Excerpt #4: “Production designer Neil Spisak [has created] an artificial forest set with a creek running through it, as well as watchtowers.”

In the wake of this morning’s ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney, the former House Republican Conference chairperson, I’m contemplating Thomas L. Friedman‘s “The Trump G.O.P.’s Plot Against Liz Cheney — and Our Democracy,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 5.11:

“In effect, the Trump G.O.P. has declared that winning the next elections for the House, Senate and presidency is so crucial — and Donald Trump’s ability to energize its base so irreplaceable — that it justifies both accepting his Big Lie about the 2020 election and leveraging that lie to impose new voter-suppression laws and changes in the rules of who can certify elections in order to lock in minority rule for Republicans if need be.

“It is hard to accept that this is happening in today’s America, but it is.

Cheney’s removal “will not constitute the end of American democracy as we’ve known it,” Friedman wrote, “but there is a real possibility we’ll look back on May 12, 2021, as the beginning of the end — unless enough principled Republicans can be persuaded to engineer an immediate, radical course correction in their party.

“If someone tried a dishonest power play at the P.T.A. of your child’s school like the one in the House, you’d be on the phone in a flash, organizing the other parents to immediately denounce and stop it. If you read about something like this happening in another pillar of democracy, like Britain or France, you’d be sick to your stomach and feel like the world was a little less safe. If you heard that a banana republic dictator had forced such a Big Lie on his sham parliament, you’d want to picket his embassy in Washington.

“But this is us — today, right now. And I fear that we’ve so defined down political deviance in the Trump years that we’ve lost the appropriate, drop-everything, Defcon 1, man-the-battle-stations sense of alarm that should greet the G.O.P. crossing such a redline.”

Forgot the boilerplate homophobic stuff, and start at the 4:04 mark:

“A tall fuckin’ order, I’ll tell you that. You can talk about every day bein’ a gift, stop and smell the roses. But regular life’s got a way of pickin’ away at it. Your house, the shit you own…it drags you down. Your kids, what they want. One bad idea after another. Tryin’ to work a cell phone menu…it’s enough to make you scream.”

Richard Rushfield‘s hard-boiled Ankler assessment of the maneuverings and backstories that led to the (temporary) death of the HFPA and the Golden Globes makes for excellent reading.

“It’s like a cheap murder mystery,” he analogizes, “in the small town where everyone had a motive.” Great line!

Key passage: “The HFPA last week issued their plan to overhaul the organization, the centerpiece of which was a commitment to ‘to fulfill the HFPA’s commitment to add at least 20 new members by August 2021 and increase membership by 50% in 18 months.’

“If the main objection on the table was the racial composition, 50% in 18 months seems like a pretty serious overhaul from where I sit. It’s a lot bigger and faster, proportionately, than the Academy transformed itself. This pledge was also accompanied by a timeline for new board elections, the adoption of new bylaws, etc. etc.

“All of which would seem to amount to just about a complete reworking of the entire group. I don’t recall the Academy, for instance, pledging that its entire board would step down.

“In response to this, the publicists’ letter was a complete dismissal that this represented change at all. So essentially they [seemed to be] demanding that the HFPA double [its] membership and the current members vote themselves out of control of the organization entirely within a year. A big ask! In the face of a pretty significant overhaul. Again, has any organization ever been asked to do that, short of criminal indictments and war crimes?”

The great actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd passed earlier today at age 106.

I was so taken by his performance as a blind but very skilled English professor in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes that I asked to chat with him. Two encounters happened, both in September ’05. We did a phoner, and then I was invited to take snaps at his Mandeville Canyon home. We talked for another hour or so.

Here’s the piece:

Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that has more than a few of them.

It’s not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight‘s fight-with-Bill-Holden scene in Network). It’s more like a coaxer. You can sense Lloyd’s intellectual energy and zest for life despite his character’s withered state, and you can feel and admire the tenderness he shows to Maggie …tenderness mixed in with a little classroom discipline.

He plays a sightless retired college professor who prods Diaz’s Maggie character, who is dyslexic and can’t read a billboard slogan without stumbling, into reading poetry to him — specifically a poem about loss and emotional guardedness by Elizabeth Bishop.

At first Maggie is reluctant, then she agrees to read to him…slowly, almost painfully…I have a dyslexic friend and she doesn’t read this slowly…but she gradually improves.

Then Lloyd prods her into explaining what she thinks of the poem. She tries to duck this, but Lloyd — relying on skills from a lifetime of teaching — won’t let her.

This isn’t just the heart of the scene — it’s a pivotal scene in the film. It’s the moment when Maggie turns the corner and starts taking steps to be someone a little better…because she starts believing in her ability to see through to the core of things, and in the first-time-ever notion that she has a lot more to develop and uncover within herself.

I know how cliched it sounds to say a character “turns a corner” and so on, but sometimes these moments happen in life. You just have to be able to hear the little voice in the back of your head that says, “You’ve taken a small step…you’ve just moved along.”