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A friend and I wandered around downtown Ridgefield, Connecticut yesterday afternoon. It’s a little more culturally complex than it used to be, but it’s still a whitebread town for the most part. Victorian homes, huge front and side lawns, super-tall trees that have been here since the Revolutionary War. Ridgefield hasn’t become an outdoor mall like Westport; it still has a certain leafy, affluent, quirky-liberal personality.

Not that I’ve ever given a damn, but Bonomo Turkish Taffy peaked in the ’50s and ’60s, was discontinued in 1989 and returned to the market in 2010.

Benedict Andrews‘ Against All Enemies, a political thriller about the FBI’s harassment of Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) over her support of the Black Panthers and sexual involvement with black power activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), has been shooting since late June. The screenplay is by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse; the dp is Rachel Morrison (Black Panther, Mudbound). Pic costars Jack O’Connell, Margaret Qualley, Colm Meaney, Zazie Beetz, Vince Vaughn and Yvan Attal as Romain Gary, whom Seberg was more or less married to at the time of her death in Paris on 8.30.79, at age 40. An all-but-guaranteed presence a year from now at Venice, Telluride or Toronto, one would think.

I’m too consumed with loathing for the habits of Average Joe moviegoers (texters, noisy eaters, drink-slurpers, constant bathroom-breakers, late arrivers, chit-chatters) to be interested in catching commercial screenings with any regularity. Hence my lack of interest in Sinemania, AMC Stubs-a-List, the all-but-defunct Moviepass, et. al. Attending all-media screenings in New York and Los Angeles is coarse enough. Otherwise give me elite film-festival screenings, press viewings in the usual small private rooms, streaming on the 65″ Sony HDR, etc.

During the first half-hour of Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27), there’s a sequence in which Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill do a HALO jump (high altitude low open) over Paris. Before Monday night’s Lincoln Square screening director Chris McQuarrie explained that the sequence was shot for real — Cruise and a dp with a head-mounted camera did over 100 jumps at magic hour. The sequence is awesome in just about every respect.

Hollywood Elsewhere totally salutes this kind of commitment to realism, and especially Cruise’s moxie. The man is a machine. But let’s also be honest — this scene probably could have been faked with wires and green screen and nobody would have known the difference. Nobody trusts visual effects and stunts any more. Over the last quarter-century the trust factor has been totally blown. Everyone assumes they’re being deceived, at least to some extent. Especially in a big-studio adventure thriller.

In 2005, Werner Herzog said the following about conveying physical reality on-screen: “I tried to explain that I wanted to have the audience know that at the most fundamental level it was real. Today when you see mainstream movies, in many moments, even when it’s not really necessary, there are special effects. It’s a young audience, and at six and seven kids can identify them…they know it was a digital effect, and normally they even know how they were done. But I had the feeling I wanted to put the audience back in the position where they could trust their eyes.”

This is what McQuarrie and Cruise tried to do in the HALO scene — get us to trust the fact that the physical performing is 100% genuine, right there in the moment, three or four miles high. HE fully respects and salutes this effort, even if it doesn’t quite feel all-the-way honest.

Example: Cruise and Cavill’s plan is to parachute right onto the roof of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysees. No high-pressure undertaking ever goes precisely according to plan, and yet they do exactly this. A more realistic scenario would have one of them missing the Palais and splashing into the Seine, or maybe landing in a nearby city park (Square Jean Perrin) and alarming a couple of pedestrians.

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A high-def version of Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo has been streamable on Amazon for about three years, but on 10.16, for the first time, a Criterion Bluray of a “4K digital restoration” will go on sale. Given what’s recently happened with Criterion’s Midnight Cowboy and Bull Durham Blurays, I’m honestly scared that Criterion will add a strong teal tint to the color. Is a brand-new Warren Beatty interview among the extras? Or perhaps with screenwriter Robert Towne? Of course not. It will, however, include a video chat between critics Mark Harris and Frank Rich plus an essay by Rich.

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According to the calculations of World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy, the following Canadian and international premieres at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival are probably Telluride-bound: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters, Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman, Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, Elizabeth Chomko‘s What They Had (an international premiere in Toronto because it premiered at Sundance, not because of Telluride) and Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick.

Apparently not going to Telluride because they’re listed as TIFF world or international premieres: Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (a surprise given that Jenkins is a longtime Telluride friend and former volunteer), Steve McQueen‘s Widows (latest pic from the winner of 2013 Best Picture Oscar gets the brushoff), Felix Von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger have reservations?), Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning, Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, Dan Fogelman‘s Life Itself, Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset and Jacques Auduiard‘s The Sisters Brothers.

You can tell right off the bat that Jonah Hill‘s Mid ’90s (A24, 10.19) is an exception of one kind or another. It sure doesn’t feel like just another Los Angeles skateboard flick. You can sense a focus on character and kid culture and ’90s minutiae. Fast and loose and raggedy — the rhythms and the atmosphere feel right.

Pic is set in the lower West L.A. region — Palms, Culver City, Venice — and partly focused on a Motor Ave. skateboard shop. (Born in ’83, Hill grew up in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood or just north of these regions.) Sunny Suljic (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) has a certain X-factor thing going, and I love that Hill has Lucas Hedges playing a bit of a domineering-shit older brother instead of the usual gentle-sensitive guy from Lady Bird, Boy Erased and Manchester By The Sea. Katherine Waterston plays Suljic’s somewhat unstable mom.

Directed and written by Hill; shot by Christopher Blauvelt (Indignation) in HE’s own 1.37 aspect ratio (boxy is beautiful) and edited by Nick Houy.

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Now that Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s Equalizer 2 has earned a solid CinemaScore A and landed in first place with an estimated $35.8 million (which slightly tops the $34.1 million opening for the original Equalizer four years ago), the Hollywood Elsewhere community is free to assess the cinematic value. How right or wrong was I in calling EQ2 “much, much better than Fuqua’s 2014 original…this time I actually felt satisfied and marginally impressed…this time I said to myself, ‘I like this guy a little more, and I like that Fuqua has actually made a better-than-half-decent programmer for a change.'”

I just want to say that Ryan Reynolds’ decision to talk about Deadpool’s pansexuality during yesterday’s Comic-Con panel is exactly the kind of inclusive, open-hearted approach to the superhero realm that we all need. I can’t honestly say that I’m waiting with bated breath for the first Deadpool-does-it-with-a-cute-guy scene, but Reynolds has possibly opened the door to all kinds of same-sex couplings within the Marvel and D.C. realm. Remember how Joel Schumacher fiddled with notions of a gay-friendly Batman 21 years ago in Batman and Robin? That didn’t lead anywhere, but now we’re talking about all kinds of possibilities. Which other Marvel superhero characters will open themselves to pansexual expressions? Will the D.C. fraternity follow suit? The sky’s the limit now, and the general superhero fraternity owes Reynolds a debt of gratitude.

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If you’re a regular follower you know all about the iCloud sign-in blockage problem on my new iPhone 8 Plus, which I bought two and half weeks ago after my previous phone was stolen. (Here’s my latest report, filed on 7.17.) Five or six days ago I wrote a famous, well-connected hotshot director to see if he knows any powerful higher-ups in the Apple corporation. If so I was hoping he might ask this person to focus on my situation for five minutes and order some senior Apple iCloud technician to fix things once and for all, and no crapping around.

Mr. Hotshot doesn’t know Tim Cook or anyone in that realm, but he did turn me on to a smart guy named Michael Newman, who runs a company called Omegapoint-it.com. I called Newman right away. I’m not out of the woods yet, but Newman has been a godsend — a steady and responsible fellow in every imaginable way, and a shrewd and proactive analyst and problem-solver extraordinaire.

Mike and a colleague visited my West Hollywood abode yesterday morning to try and use an old iMac (which I purchased in 2009) to try and sidestep or outsmart an Apple passcode problem that has prevented me from accessing my iCloud info. This approach didn’t quite work as hoped, but Mike is still working the angles.

At his advice the stolen iPhone 6s Plus has been blacklisted (i.e., deactivated) through AT&T, and now it’s a matter of informing Apple iCloud technicians that this stolen phone is no longer a working device, much less a valid or trusted one.

Once this new reality is recognized by the Apple Empire, the Apple security passcode lockout problem (basically caused by Apple’s six-digit, second-step security code being continually if nonsensically sent to the thief who stole the iPhone on 7.5) will most likely disappear. Or so Mike believes. Who am I to doubt his optimism? He said yesterday that he thinks the problem will be eradicated before the end of the coming business week. Maybe.

I shouldn’t count my chickens before they’re hatched, but I certainly owe Mike and especially Mr. Hotshot a huge debt of gratitude. If this director hadn’t responded to my email and discussed the ins and outs and recommended Mike’s assistance, I would be in the same deep hole I’ve been stuck in for the last two and a half weeks. In my book Mr. Hotshot has racked up good karma points that will last him for at least the next couple of decades.

A few hours ago Paramount Pictures announced that Paramount Television president Amy Powell had been fired after making “racially charged” statements that were “inconsistent” with the studio’s values.

According to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters and Lesley Goldberg, “the inciting incident occurred during a studio notes call for Paramount Network’s First Wives Club reboot, which is being penned by Girls Trip co-writer Tracy Oliver and will feature a predominantly black cast.” Powell allegedly expressed “generalizations about black women that struck some on the call as offensive.”

“A complaint was filed to human resources” which investigated the claims with the legal department and those involved on the notes call. Sources say Paramount considered discipline but decided to to fire Powell after she denied the allegations.” In other words, if Powell had confessed to racial insensitivity and/or p.c. wrongdoing and then begged for forgiveness she might have been spared the guillotine.

(l.) Former Paramount Television prexy Amy Powell; (r.) First Wives Club writer Tracy Oliver.

 Nobody has ever attained a high position of power and influence within a big studio without being extra careful about what to say, how to say it and whom to say it to at all times. Especially in this highly sensitive era when a single clumsily chosen word or phrase or the slightest indication of a politically incorrect sentiment on Twitter can land you in a heap of trouble.

What could Powell have said that ignited such a tempest? Sooner or later someone has to leak what it was that Powell actually said along with some context about what she apparently meant and how she might have put it more cautiously or sensitively.

Powell quote to L.A. Times: “There is no truth to the allegation that I made insensitive comments in a professional setting, or in any setting,” she said in a statement. “The facts will come out and I will be vindicated.”

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