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Yesterday BBC Culture posted a list of the 100 best foreign-language films of all time, based on a poll of 209 snooty, stodgy critics. At once well chosen and at the same time rote and droopy. The majority of the 209 are probably composed of two overlapping groups — (a) dweebs and (b) crusty, know-it-all types who are beholden to standard group-default thinking as well as their own pasts, prejudices and peculiarities and blah, blah. Don’t expect me to drop to my knees when they pass by.

All you can really say is that 209 knowledgable but flawed people chose their personal foreign-language favorites because they don’t want their colleagues to think they don’t respect the classics or that they’re knee-jerk revisionists or in some way unseasoned or scholastically incorrect, so they played it safe.

Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation is in 21st place, fine, but where the hell is Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Leviathan? Akira Kurosawa‘s Seven Samurai is #1, but I’ve never found it that wonderful. (I’ve always preferred John Sturges 1960 remake, to be honest. And I don’t care what anyone thinks of this preference either, and if they don’t like it they can blow me.) Jules Dassin‘s note-perfect Rififi is only the 91st most popular? Seems to me it deserves to be among the top 25 or 30. Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou made the list? I popped in the Bluray a couple of years ago and couldn’t get through it.

The 209 know what they know and believe what they believe, but they aren’t kings or princes or even poets. I’ll bet a good portion of them are underpaid and vaguely pissed off. I’ll bet they wear glasses and baggy pants, and have neck wattles and don’t work out that much. I’ll bet they always go to the discount section when they visit the local Barnes and Noble.

Below is a shot of Indiewire film honcho Eric Kohn (black suit, shades) and a group of Halloween revelers in standard Kubrick-tribute garb (The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket, etc.). I’m more into jack-o-lantern minimalism — for the last couple of years I’ve worn a simple leather face mask that I bought in Venice, Italy.

But if I wanted to wear a serious Kubrick-inspired outfit and if I had the time and the extra scratch, I would waltz around Savannah as either (a) Peter Sellers‘ President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove (bald head cap, glasses, gray suit and tie with three-pointed handkerchief), (b) Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove himself (wheelchair, glasses, light brown upswept hair, shiny black glove on right hand) or (c) Kirk Douglas‘ Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory (French officer military outfits, steel helmet, knee-high boots, metal whistle around neck).

Kohn and the gang.

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

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Last night I saw all of Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer (Annapurna, 12.25) — the whole 123-minute package. And I felt just as dismayed and under-nourished as I did after catching the first 90 minutes worth in Telluride (“Pains of Hell,” 9.1.18).

I was kicked, beaten up, spat upon and slapped around for walking out before my Telluride screening ended, but my assessment this morning is exactly the same. It’s still a nihilistic, dispiriting renegade-cop noir that is mainly about how Nicole Kidman‘s burnt-out-zombie makeup.

It’s stylistically impressive — Kusama does well by the rules and expectations of the urban cop genre — but pretentious and labored, and at least 20 minutes too long.

Kidman plays Erin Bell, a wasted, walking-dead Los Angeles detective trying to settle some bad business and save her daughter from a life of crime and misery. And I’m sorry but the verdict is the same — she gives a fully-invested performance but at least 75% of Kidman’s dialogue disappears into the ether because she whispers it in a kind of raspy, breathy, throat-cancer tone of voice.

Every so often I would hear a word or make out a phrase, but the only way I’m going to fully understand what Bell was saying is when I watch Destroyer with subtitles. And no, it’s not my hearing. It’s Kusama telling Kidman “go ahead, do the raspy, whispery thing…I like it.”

Okay, the ending is reasonably satisfying — it ties the story together by linking back to the opening scene. I said to myself “okay, not bad…a decent way to wrap things up.”

Last night’s Savannah Film Festival screening happened at the SCAD Trustees theatre on Broughton. I left with a sense of completion and satisfaction. For I am perceptive enough to recognize a problematic film without seeing it all the way to the end. The 90 minutes that I experienced in Telluride were not and are not substantially different than the full-boat version that I saw last night.

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Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt has posted “pixel camera” captures of the forthcoming 4K Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey (WHE, 11.20). Bill’s Facebook reaction: “Yep…it’s gorgeous. And properly color-graded. No Nolan ‘unrestored’ nonsense. NOTE: These pictures are cellphone camera photos of a projection screen — NOT FRAME GRABS. Trust me, the film looks exactly as it should in HDR.”

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Yesterday was a big Front Runner day at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Director-cowriter Jason Reitman and Best Actor contender Hugh Jackman were given the full media-glow, red-carpet treatment, and took bows before last night’s screening. But for me the most interesting moment happened during an afternoon discussion with Reitman in front of an audience of SCAD students.

The Front Runner (Sony, 11.6) is about the tragic saga of former Colorado Senator and 1988 Presidential candidate Gary Hart (Jackman), a decent, thoughtful, fairly brilliant politician who occasionally catted around and who made a really big mistake in the matter of Donna Rice. But what Hart did was almost nothing, of course, compared to the daily obscenities of Donald Trump.

And so, Reitman said, The Front Runner “becomes a really compelling story in 2018, when we are trying to figure out for ourselves, all the time, what kind of flaws are we willing to put up with in our leaders? [Because we now have] the most flawed leader imaginable, right? He’s completely indecent.”

Almost no one in the audience (i.e., mostly SCAD students) knew who Hart was or about the fuck-up that killed his Presidential campaign — an episode that was partly about Hart’s nature or character, but more profoundly about a moment in our history when political reporting suddenly became tabloidy, which is to say personally invasive, distracting and gutter-level.

Hollywood Elsewhere believes that occasionally putting the high, hard one to this or that willing recipient has nothing to do, in and of itself, with being a good or bad Senator, Congressperson or President.

Towards the end of the discussion I asked Reitman if he would have used James Fallows‘ recently reported story about Lee Atwater as a plot thread in The Front Runner, had he known about it early enough.

Atwater was a Republican operative who reportedly made a deathbed confessession about having “set Hart up” with the whole Monkey Business episode.

Reitman said that the confession wasn’t really central to The Front Runner — that it was more of an interesting Atwater anecdote than anything else. Here’s an mp3 of Reitman’s whole response to my question.

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A producer who was peripherally involved in the development of an early version of the First Blood screenplay, written by Michael Kozoll, has passed along the following story about a conference between Kozoll and First Blood exec producers Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar.

“Kozoll was in his first meeting with the producers after delivering his first draft. As is pretty standard, they were going through it page by page. They had gotten to a climactic moment in the script in which Rambo was surrounded, cops and guns on all sides, ready to slaughter him.

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All real men accept the idea of occasionally pouring hot tap water into a cup filled with Starbucks instant coffee, and being more or less okay with that. I know this sounds like a bit but I’m serious. Sometimes you have to suck it in and say “okay, not perfect but good enough.”

If you’re one of those prissy guys who insists on putting on the hush puppies and going down to the hotel restaurant and asking for a pot of steaming hot water on a tray along with a nice cup, saucer, spoon and cloth napkin…if you insist on all the proper trimmings then you’re probably too metrosexual, or in this context not really a man. Certainly not by the Hollywood Elsewhere definition of that term.

Yes, I’ve described myself as confidently metrosexual in the past but it’s actually more of a mixture of this plus the usual samurai poet warrior thing plus the spirit of Lee Marvin in the mid’ 60s, particularly the guy he played in The Professionals and not so much “Walker” in Point Blank.

Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Savannah yesterday afternoon around 5:15 pm. Mellow greetings and yukey-dukey to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, which is again hosting in fine style. Straight shuttle to the Brice Hotel and then to the big opening-night screening of Roma and…well, not to the after-party because I began to feel whipped a little after ten. But Sunday beckons. It’s warmish down here (70s, sunny) and a lot nicer than New York-era weather, I can tell you.

Sidenote: I was disappointed to see that Parker’s Urban Market on Abercorn, which used to be a kind of cultured-Southern-atmosphere store that mixed food and clothing and odd bric-a-brac, has been shorn of the funky and transformed into an aggressively upmarket 21st Century gas station-slash-gourmet deli. Thoughts of some management asshole a few months ago: “This place is too Savannah-like…too reflective of local history and culture…we need to turn it into a deluxe rest stop you might find off the Garden State Parkway in central New Jersey….aahh, that’s MUCH better!”

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Last night the belles of Roma, Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, were honored at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Opening-night screening, big media deluge, q & a with Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, general hoo-hah.

I ran into Yalitza and Marina yesterday afternoon in the lobby of Savannah’s Brice Hotel, where the festival organizers have graciously installed me for something like the fourth of fifth time.

(l. to r.) Roma costars Marina de Tavira, Yalitza Aparicio, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg during last night’s post-screening q & a.

Marina is the beating, persistent, never-say-die heart of Roma. She generates this and more without once resorting to “acting” or “selling”, and because of this and other subtle reasons she easily warrants a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Yalitza’s performance, which is Bresson-like in that she’s not a trained actress and is playing a kind of wordless, silent saint in the spiritual vein of Au hasard, Balthazar, is also stirring the Best Actress conversation pot.

From “Roma Mama,” posted on 9.11.18: “During last night’s post-premiere Roma party I spoke to Marina de Tavira, the prominent Mexico City-based stage and screen actress who plays Sofia, the spirited if frustrated mother of the family that that Alfonso Cuaron‘s ’70s-era drama is focused upon.

“Marina has played the female lead in a Mexico City stage production of Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal, she told me, and is currently preparing to star in a local stage production of David Hare‘s Skylight, which I saw performed in Manhattan three years ago with Carey Mulligan.

An unoriginal observation, sharing it anyway: Harry Davenport (1866 – 1949) was perhaps the greatest old-guy character actor in Hollywood history. It was Bette Davis‘ view that Davenport was “without a doubt the greatest character actor of all time.”

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AT&T, owner of WarnerMedia, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks, is shutting down Filmstruck because it isn’t making enough money. I only just signed up for the service in mid-August, buying a full year’s subscription, and now it’s toast? Filmstruck will disappear on 11.29.18.

A Variety story, quoting a source familiar with AT&T’s strategy, is reporting that AT&T “is looking to eliminate peripheral projects that aren’t major producers of revenue.” Fucking weasels. Soulless corporate dicks. How about serving that portion of the public that really likes having pay services like Filmstruck and the Criterion Channel?

So how do I get my money back? Filmstruck’s farewell message says that “all current FilmStruck subscribers will receive an email with details about your account and the refund process as applicable. Please see the options below for more information or email the customer service team at help@filmstruck.com.”

Metro report, 11:06 am: “Police have arrested a 56 year-old Republican named Cesar Sayoc, Jr. on suspicion of being the MAGA bomber who sent 12 pipe bombs to Democrats and Donald Trump critics. Sayoc was taken into custody close to an auto parts store in Plantation, a suburb of Miami, around 10:30 Friday morning. He was traced by DNA evidence.

“Law enforcement officials were seen covering a white van close to the scene, which appears to be covered in photos of Donald Trump, and is reported to have at least one anti-Hillary Clinton sticker. That van was seen being loaded onto a police flatbed truck. Plantation is located in the congressional district of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose last name (misspelled) was listed on the packages.”

Incidentally: I’ll bet that on some level Sen. Corey Booker (D., New Jersey) felt left out yesterday when it appeared as if he hadn’t been sent a MAGA bomb package. Well, today he joined the club.