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Posted yesterday by N.Y. Times columnist Charles Blow: “Donald Trump doesn’t care about being caught in a lie. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the truth.

“Donald Trump is a bare-knuckled politician with imperial impulses, falsely claiming that ‘when somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total,’ encouraging protesters bristling about social distancing policies to ‘liberate’ swing states, and saying that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be “overthrown, either by inside or out.”

“Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.

“In 2016, Trump stormed the castle by outwitting the media gatekeepers, exploiting their need for content and access, their intense hunger for ratings and clicks, their economic hardships and overconfidence.

“It’s all happening again. The media has learned nothing.”

A couple of months ago I expressed a reasonable concern that Criterion’s Great Escape Bluray (5.12) might be teal-ized. Now comes a review from DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze that says Criterion has gone for “yellowish, golden, sometimes green or earthy hues” — no teal whatsoever — and that it looks “brighter, shows more detail and depth and looks quite strong in-motion.”

Excerpt: “Make no mistake — with four teal-tinted disasters to their credit, a Criterion Bluray of a late 20th Century color film is now something to be feared. With Criterion having teal tinted four highly regarded classics (Teorema, Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Sisters), I’m naturally dreading what might happen this time around.”

Here’s hoping that Criterion has abandoned the teal-tinting inclinations that all but destroyed their Blurays of the four above-mentioned titles.

Hats off to “HotPockets4All” for the primary image — I added the Shatner CU.

The theoretical essence of the Open Up tea-bag movement (please correct me if I have it wrong) is something along the lines of “better to risk death or even die (while helping others to do same) than submit to a severely shuttered, economically smothered way of life that amounts to a kind of living death.”

Is that more or less it? Because it feels like a plot element from The Omega Man.

Word around the campfire is that the 2020 Telluride Film Festival might begin a day early, or on Thursday, 9.3. Maybe. Who knows?

Journo pally: Okay but do you really think Telluride can happen in early September?

HE: Sure! Actually, I don’t know. I suspect it will. Maybe they’ll hand out special blue-tinted passes to people who’ve been tested 15 to 20 days before arriving. You’ll have to send the certificate a week or two before it begins. The tested people will be allowed to congregate. The second-class festivalgoers (those who haven’t been tested) will have to maintain the usual distances and sit two seats apart. Plus no feeds or parties to speak of.

Journo pally: Well, I hope you’re right.

HE: The curve will be totally flat by August, most likely. Perhaps even by mid to late July. Yes, the virus will resurge whack-a-mole style, but Telluride people are not high-risk types for the most part. Healthier, smarter, better educated, wealthier (except for the journalists), more conscientious, better diets, no obesity to speak of. The odds of the 2020 Telluride Film Festival being turned into a catastrophic coronavirus pigfuck are not high.

Journo pally: I do hope that scenario proves more or less accurate. I’m not as convinced as you, but if that’s the way it happens, I think we’ll be fine.

HE: You’re saying in a very gentle way that I don’t really know anything. Which is true, of course. But I need to believe in this. I need to be believe in a future that includes a little bit of open-air happiness and fraternity and the return of films screened in theatres.

I had an odd dream this morning. I was attending an Oscar-related party in a large, elegant pre-war home in Los Angeles. Probably taking place in the past as social congregating was rampant. Amber light, magic hour, probably in mid-summer. I recognized exactly one fellow journalist (Michael Musto) but otherwise I might as well have been in rural Oregon or Utah. Stag, sans Tatiana…no idea why.

I was standing near a fireplace when a gray-haired guy and his wife said hello. He was a dentist, he casually mentioned, and in fact had performed some dental work on me a year or so ago. I didn’t want to be impolite but he had to be mistaking me for someone else. And, he added, I hadn’t fully paid my bill. That startled me. I suddenly realized I had in fact been to his office and somehow forgotten. I apologized and said I’d PayPal him the balance. “What’s your email?” I asked. “You have it,” he said, although he wouldn’t say his name.

I sat down on a couch in a shaded sunporch area, and laid my head back and closed my eyes. Seconds later I nodded off. I awoke some time later and noticed it was still fairly light out and that the same people were milling around. I looked at my watch and realized it was 6:30 am the following morning. I’d slept nine or ten hours. My first thought was that Tatiana was probably sleeping but would be worried, and that I had to call and explain what happened. And then I woke up.

Interpretation: The party represents my longing to experience social mingling once again. Sleeping through a party represents anguish over missing out on the joy of living during the pandemic. The dentist telling me that I still owe him money represents my anxiety about ad revenue. The absence of Tatiana indicates my existential sense of being permanently alone, in the European philosopher or J.J. Gittes sense of that term. The fact that I thought immediately of calling her when I woke up at 6:30 am means only that I knew I’d be in trouble if I didn’t.

Producer pally (reacting to yesterday’s “The Draining“): “Sheesh. Can you start your column with a more depressing headline and opening? Are you trying to drive readers away? Give us a break!”

HE to Producer Pally: “So the recipe for vigorous readership is fantasy, nostalgia, sweet music, re-voting past Oscar competitions, fairy tales and the like? We’re living through a cross between a Steven Soderbergh and a George Romero film — an open-ended pandemic nightmare with bumblefuck zombies howling about Gretchen Whitmer — life in a vast, shrouded minimum security concentration camp with wifi and streaming at home.

“On one hand I’m happy and counting our blessings — Tatiana and I are both healthy, working hard, taking occasional walks and watching a lot of streaming, and on the other hand I occasionally dream about snorting heroin. Because ‘life’ (that once-familiar state of natural being that occasionally included joy and rapture and various states of wonder **) has basically stopped.

Producer pally: “Stop the drama. It’s easy enough to find the middle ground without declaring an apocalypse.”

** As well as grimacing as young wine-drinking women shrieked with Irish banshee laughter in restaurants and bars…that was part of the symphony back then.

I own a relatively recent 4K UHD Amazon version of Byron Haskin and George Pal‘s The War of the Worlds (’53). It’s one the most dazzling eye-baths in the history of upmarket restorations of Technicolor classics. Pure dessert. (There’s also a great-looking 4K version on iTunes.)

It was shot by George Barnes, whose dp credits include Spellbound, None But The Lonely Heart, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Samson and Delilah and The Greatest Show on Earth. The poor man died of a heart attack in May 1953, or roughly three months after The War of the Worlds opened in major markets.

I can’t imagine…no one can imagine how the upcoming Criterion Bluray version (July 7, “new 4K digital restoration”) could possibly top the Amazon or iTunes UHD versions. The Criterion disc will look fine, of course, but what’s the point? I’ll be surprised if any half-knowledgable film fanatic calls it a serious bump-level Bluray. It’s not in the cards.

Wait…is Criterion planning to add teal tints?

As feared and forecasted, The Hollywood Reporter has made some top-level coronavirus staff cuts, and THR‘s chief film critic Todd McCarthy is among the casualties. Once movies and film festivals start happening again (presumably by August if not before) McCarthy would presumably get his gig back. Right?

Longtime veteran McCarthy is one of the most perceptive, eloquent and widely admired film critics in the realm today. Knows everyone and everything, has written books, directed a great doc about cinematography among others, etc.

THR‘s award-season pulsetaker and industry investigator Scott Feinberg has been spared, at least for the time being.

Excerpt of McCarthy statement, posted today at 5:13 pm on Deadline: “A month ago I was surprised, out of nowhere, to get a nice raise. Yesterday I got the boot. By guys I’ve never met. Apparently if you make over a certain amount, you’re suddenly too expensive for the new owners of The Hollywood Reporter, which has recently been reported as losing in the vicinity of $15 million per year. Dozens are being forced to walk the plank. It’s a bloodbath.

“What were the bosses thinking when they gave me a raise last month? What on earth are they thinking now? As I said to The New York Times when I was let go from Variety just over a decade ago, ‘It’s the end of something.’ What the next something is — for everyone is our business — seems less knowable than ever.”

J.C. Chandor‘s Margin Call (Lionsgate/Roadside) was one of the big highlights of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, or a decade ago. There’s no way that a film like Margin Call (a story about white financial elites grappling with a 2008-like Wall Street crisis, and costarring an accused sexual predator) would premiere at the Sundance Woke Festival of today, 95% of which focuses almost entirely on films about women’s issues, people of color, the LBGTQ community, etc.

This is why Sundance is essentially over — why it has come to the end of a long history of success and vitality (early ’90s to 2017) after succumbing to HUAC-style Khmer Rouge wokeness mixed with strong currents of punitive #MeToo consciousness. Not for being progressive, but for creating and feeding a political environment that (not absolutely but to a large extent) frowns upon the white-guy (and especially the older white guy) realm.

Margin Call is arguably Chandor’s best film ever, and it contains one of the finest Kevin Spacey performance of the 21st Century. Not to mention the performances by Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Simon Baker and Paul Bettany.

HE commenter: “Worked in investment banking during the 80’s. Most of the guys at the top tier (Spacey/Bettany characters) don’t know how to ‘read’ the numbers. The film drilled it home that they are salesmen. They wine and dine bright and aggressive young men and bring them in to the business. The boardroom scene hinges on the idea that all these financial geniuses look to a rocket scientist (Quinto) for confirmation that their business plan is screwed. 2008 is summed up with the correct conclusion — nobody knows anything. One of the year’s best.”

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The differences between the internals (political allegiances, character, guiding philosophy, ethics) of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and ’50s-era Senate Majority Leader (and then Vice-President and U.S. President) Lyndon B. Johnson are stark.

During his mid ’50s to mid ’60s heyday Johnson was a tough and wily politician who pushed through progressive legislation.

Since he became Majority Leader in early ’15 McConnell has done nothing of significance except (a) block Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, (b) block pretty much all legislation that doesn’t serve corporate interests and (c) serve the agenda of an Oval Office sociopath.

For most of his Congressional political career Johnson hid his liberal-moderate colors while being fairly unscrupulous in his pursuit of naked power.

McConnell, on the other hand, has shown himself to be an absolute reptile — a hollow, soulless operator without beliefs, as Jane Mayer’s 4.12 New Yorker profile (“How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief“) points out in elaborate detail.

Every day McConnell coughs up hairballs of cynicism and serves the agenda of the most dangerous president in the history of this nation.

But I have to say (and it gives me no pleasure to do so) that while reading Mayer’s piece I was reminded of descriptions of Johnson in Dave Grubin‘s American Experience doc “LBJ” — descriptions offered by former aides and friends during Johnson’s Senate Majority days.

Howard Schuman, U.S. Senate Aide: “Well, one doesn’t know whether he was a liberal or a reactionary. Probably he was neither. He probably was just an extraordinarily skillful parliamentarian who was an opportunist and who sensed the wind and then went in that direction.”

Ronnie Dugger, LBJ Biographer: “…the absolutely unqualified opportunism of a successful politician of this particular mold.”

John Connally, LBJ Campaign Aide, LBJ Advisor: “He had no interests, really, except politics. That was his whole life. He was totally committed to it. He never read anything except politics. He didn’t care about any sports. He didn’t read any books. I don’t know of one book he read in all the years I’ve known him.”

Joseph Rauh, Jr., Americans for Democratic Action: “My opinion was that he was destroying the Democratic Party and not doing his job. His job was the opposition to the Eisenhower Administration and he didn’t do it. They were just playing hanky-panky with each other and there was really no Democratic opposition.”

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With nothing much to say, a couple of shots from earlier today plus 17 or 18 images of life as it was not long ago…pre-masks, pre-surgical gloves, pre-incessant hand washings, etc.

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I was reminded this morning by the occasionally irritating “Bruce Taking A Nap” that I’d never posted a review of Michael Winterbottom‘s Greed (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.28).

Reply: Good heavens! I saw Winterbottom’s reasonably well-made, generally respectable one-percent satire around 2.20. I didn’t just “forget” to review it. I wasn’t that deeply stirred, you see, and somehow it slid to the side. I’m nonetheless sorry for dropping the ball. Not cool, profound apologies to Michael and Tom, won’t happen again.

Steve Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a super-rich, Philip Green-resembling garment industry titan who ruthlessly exploits the Indian labor market by insisting on paying less than $4 or even $3 per day for sewing-machine sweatshop workers (location unspecified but think Myanmar or Bangladesh).

I found it hard to get it up because I had determined that Greed was a decent but somewhat minor effort — emphasis on the “somewhat” as it hits what it’s aiming at. The Rotten Tomato rating was nonetheless 48%.; Metacritic was 52%.

I was partly influenced by the fact that Greed had screened at the Toronto and Santa Barbara Film Festivals without generating what I would call significant heat. The promotional lead-up to the U.S. opening was accompanied by a certain lack of hoopla, and I somehow allowed my attention to wander and wither.

I wasn’t shocked to learn once again that certain garment industry titans (like Zara’s Amancio Ortega and H&M’s Stefan Persson) have become multi-billionaires off the backs of hand-to-mouth Indian workers. I was a wee bit underwhelmed, I suppose, when I realized early on that the basic thrust of Greed was to say this over and over again — i.e., that McCreadle (who has huge, show-white teeth) is an insanely greedy prick. Yes, agreed, he is that…and that’s it? Yes, the basic idea.

Greed isn’t a drama or a comedy as much as an instructional one-note satire.

I suppose I didn’t feel that repeatedly making this point was enough. But within this parameter, Greed is a reasonably good film in a Michael Winterbottom sort of way. Seriously. I know what this review sounds like, but I’m not putting it down. Not really, I mean.